


Equilibrium

by VivWiley



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s07e22 Requiem, F/M, post-ep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-15
Updated: 2013-05-15
Packaged: 2017-12-11 22:04:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 49,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/803754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VivWiley/pseuds/VivWiley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How do you direct a manhunt for a man you know is no longer anywhere on the planet?  Skinner and Scully hunt for Mulder post-Requiem.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A million years ago (in Internet time), the X-Files had a season finale called Requiem. 8,000 fics (+/-) tried to respond. This is one of my efforts to try to describe "what happened next?".
> 
> Disclaimer: The characters and situations of the X-Files are the property of Fox and 1013. No infringement is intended. No profit will be made.

How do you direct a manhunt for a man you know is no longer anywhere on the planet?

It became some weird existential riddle that dogged Skinner in the initially horrifying and then mind-numbingly repetitious days that followed his return from Oregon. The simplest answer, "look among the stars," although having a certain poetic quality, was not an option. At least not in the corridors and briefing rooms of the FBI.

How do you sit through update after update, listening to your agents tell you that they have made no progress without telling them you never expected them to make progress? How do you continue to provide them guidance and leadership, suggestions for new places to look, while trying to look properly impatient with the fact that they hadn't yet found Agent Mulder? Knowing all the while they weren't going to find him.

How do you learn to function without sleep so that you can direct the hunt for Mulder 12-14 hours a day at the Bureau and then continue the hunt at night with the only hope you really have: an improbable and probably not entirely trust-worthy group of allies who are using resources you would, on balance, really rather not know too much about?

The last, at least, was an easier question to answer. He had long ago learned how to function for extended periods of time with inadequate sleep. He was not as young as he had been, but rage and fear and a sense of time running out were powerful stimulants. He lived on coffee and adrenaline, driven by the need he saw in Scully's eyes.

But he could feel the ragged edge of control slipping through his grasp.

 

He'd told Scully in her hospital room that he would tell "them" the truth, that he could not deny what he had seen. He had meant it. He'd felt the conviction rolling through him--a tsunami released by a dam that finally gave way.

He was so sick of losing and he wanted the righteous clarity of telling the Truth and taking a stand against the various shadows and petty bureaucratic regulations that had confined him for so long. But, as so often before, he'd been stopped, forced to regroup. Surprisingly, it had been Scully who'd reined him in.

"Don't tell them, sir."

He'd been heading for the door of her hospital room, shaking and exhausted. Torn by the competing emotions of the unexpected hope in Scully's news, and his own lingering hopelessness and sense of guilt over Mulder's disappearance.

He stopped without turning back. "I already promised you that I'd keep your..." he hesitated, almost saying 'your and Mulder's' although she hadn't told him anything more than the stark fact of her pregnancy. He continued, "...your news confidential." It hurt him that she felt she had to reinforce her request for secrecy.

"No. That's not what I meant. Don't tell them about the ship, sir."

At that he turned around to meet her lucid gaze. In his weariness he couldn't make sense of her command. "Why?" Aware of a sharpness in his tone he was powerless to control.

"It won't do any good." She smiled slightly. "Look, I've been where you are. Literally. I know how much you want to help, but you won't be as effective if the Bureau thinks you've cracked up." She raised a hand, forestalling his protest.

"I know how much you want to tell them what you saw out there, but I also know how they'll react. You know how many times I've gone after Mulder, trying to pull him back from the brink of one chase or another. You know how many times he's come after me.

"You also know that most of those times we were only able to undertake those searches because you were protecting us. Turning a blind eye to unexplained absences, taking the heat for us when we missed yet another staff meeting, or failed to make a reporting deadline. You were there covering us, opening the ways for us to search."

Her voice faltered just slightly, and for the first time since he'd turned back, her eyes dropped to the sheet that she held taut in her fingers. He followed her gaze, surprised to realize her knuckles were white from the force of her grip on the cloth.

"We have to find him, sir. And I'm going to need your help. You won't be able to do that if you are being questioned and treated with suspicion because you suddenly profess a belief in aliens."

When she looked up again, her eyes were clear, but beneath the placid surface he could feel the turmoil circling and spiraling through her. "All those times, you were there protecting us from the top as well as you could. Who would protect you?"

The challenge caught him unaware, and he stared at her in blank silence for a long minute as he cataloged his colleagues, weighing their power, their allegiances, the favors they owed him.

Finally he shook his head slightly, a tiny acknowledgment that she was right. He raised his eyebrow. "You want me to lie?"

"I wouldn't ask that. I'm just suggesting that there are ways of...finessing the truth. Telling them what they need to know without committing yourself to a report that could lead to suggestions of early retirement. Space ships, airplanes....they come in many shapes and sizes, you know?" There was the tiniest hint of laughter in her eyes, but her tone remained level, serious.

He watched her for another moment, understanding that she knew that he was suddenly wondering how many of her and Mulder's reports had been finessed. "Convenient omissions? Vagueness at key moments of description?"

Then she did laugh. "That's the spirit." Instantly sober again. "I hate that I have to ask that of you, but I have to find him. And the Bureau won't find him no matter what you tell them."

That sobered him, too. Realizing she was right, and his report on Mulder's disappearance would have no impact whatsoever on their finding him. The thought staggered him a little. He felt the world tilt around him while he desperately searched for purchase.

How were they going to find Mulder? Where would he even start? He had been thinking of the manhunt they would launch--the full-scale use of Bureau resources to find Mulder. He was annoyed with himself for not seeing sooner that the Bureau's resources would be of little use. His chest tightened as he began realizing how far out of his depth he was.

Scully read his sudden fear and confusion, and began getting out of bed to walk toward him. He stopped her with an impatient gesture. "You're right. We have to approach this carefully--keep all avenues open and not raise too many suspicions. Bad enough I lost an agent under my command. If I tell them exactly what I saw, I'll simply be put on administrative leave and sent to counseling."

The word 'lost' echoed between them.

He walked over to where she lay, once more tucked under the covers. "We'll find him, Scully. We will." He touched her briefly on the shoulder and walked away.

Behind him, as the door was closing, he heard her murmur again, "We'll find him. I have to find him."

 

The report he finally filed was a carefully crafted amalgamation of the truth and slightly shaded fiction. The crash of the Navy plane provided him a starting point for the half-truths he wrote. He managed to describe the bright lights and the craft he saw in terms that could be interpreted to apply to a half-dozen experimental military aircraft. He carefully glossed over the exact reasons he and Mulder had been in those woods at that time of the night. The on-going Bureau initiative to close and archive old cases gave him another half-cover for what he wrote.

There were a number of hard questions from his superiors and the other ADs about his version of events. But he had questioned Mulder on enough of these types of reports to anticipate the majority of the challenges. He also had a great deal of practice lying to people.

The report was filed and he assumed command of the investigation into the disappearance of Special Agent Fox W. Mulder.

The official story about Scully's hospitalization was that she had been felled by a minor flu, and become dehydrated. She was returned to active duty almost immediately, and joined the Bureau hunt for Mulder in an advisory capacity. Since it was her partner missing she wasn't allowed to assume the role of Agent in Charge. That unhappy responsibility fell to Special Agent John Chen, a 10-year veteran who had made a name for himself in kidnapping cases early in his career, and had since moved on to violent crimes.

Skinner selected Chen because he was a conscientious and work-man like agent. Bright and hard-working, but not noted for wild leaps of logic or intuitive hunches. Skinner needed someone who would doggedly pursue what little hard evidence there was and not get in the way of the "real" but extremely unofficial investigation that Krycek, Marita and Mulder's odd friends were undertaking from deep in the shadows.

There were brief moments of guilt, when Skinner sat and listened to Chen's frustration over the failure of any of the evidence to lead to any real trails toward Mulder. When this was all over, he promised himself, he would see to it that Chen was assigned to an investigation where he would be guaranteed to shine and earn his next promotion.

Skinner despised the waste of resources that the investigation was causing. In one particularly dark night he began to tally the total costs of the FBI investigation. He stopped after his calculations reached $250,000. It did not give him much comfort to realize that on the scale of massive investigations the costs were relatively small. A quarter of a million dollars was a quarter of a million dollars.

But, he allowed the investigation to continue. Doing so meant that Scully didn't have to, for the time being, take on any regular cases, or be assigned a temporary partner. It also made it easier for her to take time off. Any time away from the office was explained away as her following up on leads from old cases that might have a bearing on Mulder's disappearance. He also held out a small hope that the Bureau's resources might uncover some small clue that would help them.

Then there were the nights.

Krycek and Marita were leading the secondary investigation. Scully was directing their efforts, but couldn't take charge on a full-time basis. They had discussed the option of Scully taking a leave of absence from the Bureau to run the shadow investigation, but ultimately they agreed that her absence would raise questions from a number of sources that they couldn't afford. They knew that much of the conspiracy had been wiped out 18 months ago, in the immolation at El Rico Air Force Base. But none of them believed the shadows had been completely destroyed, and it seemed safer to assume they were being watched by a number of people.

The other investigation ran on wholly different principles and approaches than the investigation he was overseeing with its staff of dozens and nearly limitless resources. But it was the investigation he knew was the only real hope of achieving their objective. Mulder's strange friends, whom he had last seen in Mulder's hospital room last year when Mulder had been found after that wild jaunt to Bermuda, were beginning to generate leads through a variety of Internet-based contacts.

Krycek and Marita were pursuing the leads as quietly as they could, and also hunting down contacts and possibilities from their former lives. They would disappear for a day or two at a time, sometimes together and sometimes singly. Then they would reappear bearing news, almost always negative, but occasionally pointing them in a new direction. Their gains were frustratingly small and so far had yielded nothing except to confirm the things that Skinner and Scully already knew.

Skinner sensed a strange tension between Alex and Marita, but couldn't spare the energy to think about it too long.

He did not trust Krycek, or Ms. Covarrubias. Their appearance in the FBI building had been a little too conveniently timed. Their story and offer of help too perfect. Skinner believed in the possibilities of human redemption--of people changing, and deciding to fight for the right side--but he couldn't bring himself to believe it of either of them. The only thing he trusted was that he had no other viable options for the time being, and so far, at least, they both seemed genuinely committed to helping find Mulder.

It had been a shock to see Alex again, clean, professionally dressed, looking almost like the agent he might have matured into. Krycek had made no mention of the hold he had over Skinner. The palm pilot control was not in evidence when they'd made their unexpected visit to Skinner's office, demanding to see Mulder. But the implied threat was there at the back of his former agent's eyes.

Skinner wondered if the elusive Ms. Covarrubias knew of the devices in his blood. He wondered exactly what her game was.

It was something of a shock to realize that already three weeks had passed since Mulder's disappearance in Oregon.

There was so little time to think. Days eaten up by the official investigation, and the endless bureaucratic tasks that never ceased even when there were agents missing. Nights given over to working with his other team, trying to sort out the facts that Byers, Frohike and Langly uncovered against the information that his agents had brought him. Winnowing out leads, trying to make decisions about which of the more fantastic possibilities they should pursue. Trying to decide in every moment who to trust, how to proceed, having no one to share counsel with.

The lack of sleep was beginning to wear on him. As was the lack of privacy. The only time he was alone anymore was the few hours of sleep he got on odd nights, or when he was driving from the Bureau to the Alexandria warehouse where the Lone Gunmen, as Scully called them, had set up a base of operations.

His skin felt paper thin. He felt the continual presence of others around him--sandpaper scraping him rough, raw, painfully exposed. He was not, he knew, a people person, never had been. The combined weight of his sense of guilt over losing Mulder, and the erosion of his resources in running these dual investigations was catching up with him.

Sitting in his car that night, a brief pause while he gathered strength before entering the warehouse, he thought again about what he'd seen in Oregon. The wonder and terror of realizing what it was that was passing over his head, the sick, sure knowledge that Mulder was on that thing, the wrenching comprehension that nothing now could ever be the same.

His declaration to Scully that he could no longer deny what he had seen had been a lifetime in coming. He was no stranger to the unexplainable, and the time had long since passed for him to move beyond his own fears and "look further." He recalled with a certain melancholy the speech he'd given Mulder when the agent had almost resigned when Scully had gone missing four years earlier. Even with all that had already happened to them at that point, they had all been younger and more naive. He felt the force of his years pressing down on him; gravity was heavier these days.

He shook himself from his reverie. There was no time for regret -- that could come later. Scully had passed him in the hall today and said Langly had uncovered something that looked promising. In her voice had been a spark of hope that he hadn't heard in over a week.

He walked into the warehouse, praying, as he had done every night for the last three weeks, for a miracle.


	2. Chapter 2

Miracles seemed to be in short supply these days.

At least as far as their investigations into Mulder's disappearance went, they had been experiencing a distinct dearth of miraculous revelations. Even simple good luck seemed elusive.

Scully sighed and pushed her hair out of her eyes. She was leaning over a table in the Gunmen's headquarters, and her gesture fought a momentary battle against gravity and lost--lank, weary strands tumbling back in place to partly obscure her vision. It scarcely mattered. There was nothing there to see--the infra-red satellite image of the woods remained stubbornly blank.

"Damn it." She whispered the words, aware that she was merely venting her frustration; vocalizing the tension and lost hope that seemed to permeate every inch of the warehouse. She pinched the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes against the lack of evidence; then she straightened and turned away, walking a few steps toward the back reaches of the warehouse where the extra equipment and cots were stored.

Too long, they were taking too long. They had to find him. She needed to find him. The thoughts thrummed through her, taking over the rhythm of her heartbeat, changing her rate of breathing. It was the thought that drove her every moment, that echoed underneath everything else she did.

This, she realized, was what he had felt when she went missing, when she was abducted, not once, but several times. But this was also different. Mulder fundamentally believed. In himself, in the righteousness of his quest, in infinite possibilities.

She knew too much, had seen too much, and had begun to lose what little belief she had left. There was still faith, but that was a different matter. She was not a pessimist, but she was a realist who saw things in very cold terms. And Mulder seemed further away with every passing freezing moment.

She could feel the others behind her. Sense their own frustration and their muted worry about her. She allowed herself one humorous half-thought: if only they knew. They thought she was consumed with worry over Mulder, and she was, feeling his loss aching down the very axis of her soul. But there was this other factor, this other need driving her. The news she'd received in the hospital, that no one other than Skinner knew. The news that was its own miracle.

But there was no time to think about that right now. It was all too complex, snarled beyond any hope of untangling. There was this news about a new life that was hers, and rightly also his. But, she did not know, really, what it meant. She needed to see him to know what to do. To know what this would mean for them.

She turned back to the friends who waited.

"It's no good." A flat statement, trying to contain her own uncertainty and fear.

"No, it's not. I'm sorry, Scully. I thought..." Langly's voice was almost inaudible.

She cut him off. "I know. We'd all hoped that this would be the confirmation...." An acknowledgment both of the tremendous risks that Frohike and Langly had undertaken to obtain the image, and the fact that the risks had been for naught--there were no usable data on the film.

"We'll just have to wait for Krycek to report in." She did not add, as she wanted to, 'if he reports in.' She did not thank them for their efforts. She had so few words left, and they had so many tasks left before them.

"I'm going to step out back for a bit. I think I need some fresh air." A rueful shrug that conveyed her sudden restlessness. "Will you let me know when Skinner gets here?"

Langly had already turned back to his computer, surfing the web once more, searching more sites to hack, bulletin boards to read to look for some small strange clue. Frohike, though, still watched her steadily. He gave her a brief nod. In his eyes she saw an unexpected sympathy and weary sorrow that threatened her steadiness for the first time in days.

She hurried out the back door, taking deep gulps of the cool night air, her face instinctively turning upward--eyes seeking the stars.

"Where are you, Mulder? Where?" and then no longer aloud, because they were words she couldn't voice. I need you. _Come back. Come back to me. I don't know what to do without you._

Another ten seconds of longing and then she cut off her stream of thoughts like the ruthless automaton so many thought her to be. There was no time for that sort of self-indulgence, and in the final analysis it was also wrong.

She longed to have him back, but she also knew that she could and would survive without him, if she had to.

There had even been tiny moments--no longer than the space between her heartbeats--when she was selfishly glad that he hadn't been there for the first few days when she'd learned the news of her pregnancy. His absence had given her time to absorb the news, try to adjust to its strangeness, to refit her life around this new truth.

She had always been a person who needed time to formulate her opinion. While Mulder could leap from the suggestion of a clue into a wholly formed theory in a matter of seconds, she needed more. She needed time to weigh the evidence, consider all the data and the various theories they might support, and to arrive at her conclusions cautiously and safely, with a clearly marked trail to show how she got there.

Life on the X-Files did not always permit her that luxury, but it was how she worked best, what made her most comfortable. And over 7 years, she had learned to react quickly, to even leap ahead of Mulder sometimes, to surprise him when he arrived at his conclusions only to find her already there. But it was something she did reluctantly, or only in fun. For the deadly serious matters, she relied on the old habits--the careful calculations, the deliberate testing of hypotheses.

But the old habits failed her now. How do you weigh the facts of the unbelievable? How do you calculate the impossible? What hypotheses should she test now?

Her initial joy had almost immediately given way to something darker, less certain. Impossible for her not to allow all the possibilities to run through her mind, consciously and unconsciously. She awoke in the middle of the night, drowning in images and visions that ran the gamut from finding herself in a suburb with a white picket fence and a mini-van, to finding herself once more on an alien ship, the victim of new experiments.

The thought of the ship in the Antarctic, and the other time that she had known something grew inside her was an icy slap. A horrifying possibility that the scientist in her could not ignore.

She had been pronounced barren by human doctors. Human doctors who could and clearly had made a mistake. And yet, and yet....she had also run into too many human doctors in league with things that were not completely of this earth. Could one of them have implanted something in her? Could she be nothing more than a human test tube?

The third night she had been back from the hospital, she had spent the entire night pacing her apartment consumed by that terrifying prospect. What was growing inside her? Was it the simple miracle of Mulder's child, or was it something else entirely?

Too early for sonograms to tell her anything, and she wasn't sure that even if she had a sonogram it would tell her what she needed to know. She thought again of the frozen embryo she'd stolen from the cryolab seven years ago, in a desperate attempt to save Mulder that had ended in his return, but also the death of the man they'd called Deep Throat. Could one of those be what she carried?

If it was, would she know only when it was too late?

By dawn she had been exhausted, consumed by the emotions of worry and terror, depleted from simple sleep deprivation.

But facing that watery gold light of the rising sun, she had realized that on some level it didn't matter. This was the hand she had been dealt. She would play it out. She had time. She thought she had at least some time.

And then she had all too much time.

Despite actively participating in two investigations, it seemed that there was still too much time to think. To brood about the possibilities and imagine what might be happening to him.

To wonder exactly where he was.

She'd listened to Skinner's tale of what happened in Oregon with a familiar sense of being balanced on the knife edge between incredulity and belief. She had seen a ship like that in the skies over Antarctica--for a moment only and through ice-blurred eyes--and seeing it had scarcely believed what it was she saw. Later, she would wonder if she had hallucinated the whole thing, but Mulder's descriptions of what he had seen when he rescued her from the icy goo had stirred memories and a sense of "yes" that was impossible to ignore.

And so, believing Skinner, she was now torn between a sense that they would need a miracle, some kind of other-worldly intervention to find him, and an all too mundane sense of irritation that they were simply facing a foe who had to be outwitted, out-thought, and who would eventually, must eventually fall before their will and intelligence and resources.

She was tired of this divided life. Everything she did, it seemed, had a subtext, a counter-weight.

She was an agent of the FBI by day, advising an investigation into the disappearance of her partner. Her partner, who was also her lover. She was a scientist and asked for her opinion of evidence and chemical analyses and patterns of clues. What she wanted to tell them was they were looking on the wrong planet.

At night she directed another investigation entirely, working with a group of people she couldn't begin to explain, and who she felt, unfairly, were some kind of strange inheritance she'd received from Mulder. A collection of eccentric relatives bequeathed to her without her consent.

The Gunmen had long since become familiar to her, part of her landscape, but she was always uncomfortably aware that they were Mulder's friends and a part of his life that she would never really understand. They were her friends, too, she knew, but it was still difficult for her to put her weight fully down when she was around them.

Then there were Krycek and Marita. Their participation, she was still afraid to really think of it as help, in this investigation was a surreal element that made her wonder occasionally if she were about to wake up at any moment, like Dorothy, to discover that it had all been a dream.

She did not know what to make of them. How to deal with them. She didn't trust them, and had the strong sense that Skinner didn't either. Yet, they were there, and she seemed to have no choice but to accept their aid. Given the Gunmen's general reluctance to make public appearances, it had been useful to have Marita and Krycek out there beginning to chase down the more improbable leads during the days while she and Skinner were at the Bureau.

But it worried her to have so little control, so little chance to see what they were really doing.

By this third week, though, she would have traded whatever little control she still had for a break, any sort of break in either of the investigations. Nothing had surfaced for the last six days in the Bureau investigation, and the latest round of intelligence gathered from the Gunmen's hacking had yielded nothing.

Krycek was out in Oregon, or at least that's where they thought he was.

A week ago, Langly had caught wind, through one of the MUFON web boards, of a strange light and energy surge in the woods just north of the area where Skinner had last seen Mulder. Hacking into surveillance systems of nations that Scully didn't even want to know about, Byers and Langly had found a series of images of the area that looked startlingly like the energy readings and images that had shown up on the same systems the night Mulder had vanished.

There had also been secondary readings, strange images that seemed to show objects falling from the sky. Later images of the same area revealed unusual infra-red images that looked like humans, or something like humans in the woods, miles from any hunting territory or inhabited areas. A hypothesis was quickly formed that the aliens, or whatever you wanted to call them, had returned some or all of the recent abductees.

Scully wanted to fly out to Oregon right away. Skinner wanted to send someone from the Portland Bureau to check the general area. The Gunmen had argued for contacting one of their friends in Seattle and having her drive down, vociferously protesting that no one in any official capacity could be trusted at this point.

While the argument was raging in the warehouse, they hadn't noticed Krycek quietly slipping out. An hour later they got a staticky call from Krycek who was aboard a jet headed for the West coast.

He'd called again to tell them he'd reached the area that showed the strange readings on the satellite photos. He had found evidence of some kind of craft landing, but there had been heavy rains the previous two days, washing most of the trace evidence away.

Then there had been silence for two days, until two o'clock one morning, just as Scully had been preparing to leave the warehouse to snatch a few hours sleep, she was stopped by a sudden commotion. Skinner had already departed. Scully knew that no matter how early she got to the Hoover Building the next morning, she would find him there, already on his second or third cup of coffee.

"Scully!" "Dana!" Byers' and Frohike's voices had clashed, overlapping and echoing in the open space.

Tired as she was, it had taken her a moment to react.

"Scully?" Byers' voice strangely high-pitched, urgent.

She turned back, wondering what the sudden excitement was.

"Look at this." Frohike was staring intently at the screen of his computer, the blue-glow reflecting back on his glasses and skin turning him into a cartoon character, strange and almost unrecognizable.

She leaned over his shoulder, looking at the map on the screen, the glowing green 'X' superimposed over a section of what appeared to be a Federal Park. "What am I looking at?"

Byers clicked and dragged, manipulating the image, zooming outward, until she realized the 'X' marked a spot just west of the area of the Oregon woods where they presumed Krycek was investigating the crash site.

"What....? Who sent this?" Her voice sharp with something she didn't want to recognize as hope.

A glowing green 'X,' so silly, so like Mulder. She let out a breath, hope draining away as quickly as she had glimpsed it. "This is from Krycek?"

"We don't know," Frohike's eyes never left the screen, "but we think so. The email came in with all the headers stripped out, a beautifully elegant job of bouncing it through numerous servers and services. I think I traced it back to a primary server in Eugene, Oregon, but it's only an 80% probability."

Langly, who had been taking a nap in the back area, suddenly materialized behind her. "Who knew the one-armed dude had such mojo? Do you think he used a meta--"

"Agent Scully, there was another attachment in the e-mail," Byers cut off Langly, smoothly drawing their attention back to the computer.

The second attachment proved to be a photograph of what appeared to be a heavily guarded and very well camouflaged compound deep in woods.

"X marks the spot," Frohike chanted, then looked up at the consternation on the others' faces. "What? C'mon, someone had to say it."

They all turned and looked at Scully. She realized they were waiting for her to say something, make some decision, order some action. She stared back at the screen, willing her exhausted mind to come up with something to say. Anything.

She resorted to fact-finding. "What did the e-mail say?"

"There wasn't anything else. Just the attachments." Frohike shrugged. "It got routed through so many servers there's an off chance the text got stripped somewhere, although it's more likely the attachments would have gotten lost. Maybe he, or whoever sent it, didn't want to risk saying anything."

She felt the frustration welling up. "Then why bother even sending us this? What does he want us to do with this information?"

"It's obviously something important." Byers looked like he was struggling to add something to the thought.

She turned back to the screen. "Ok, I'm not sure what we've got here, but we should check it out. Can you guys connect with some of the satellites and get confirmation of these images? If there is something in this compound it should show up on some kind of scan, some kind of energy or heat reading. Right?" She looked at the group of men clustered around her, searching for confirmation.

Heads nodded. Langly's eyes began unfocusing and his fingers twitched slightly, as though he were already clicking away at his keyboard, slipping through the security nets of a half-dozen systems.

She ran a hand through her hair, "Look, I'm so tired I can hardly stand up anymore. See what you can find out about this area, and we'll go from there tonight, ok? Maybe by then, we'll have heard something else from Krycek."

It had taken two days for the guys to get uplinked with the appropriate satellites. The area on the map was strangely and suspiciously "dark," not captured on any of the 100 or so regular satellites that sweep the country capturing and recording billions of bytes of data on a daily basis. It wasn't until they accessed two ultra-secret satellites, one of which was a highly experimental satellite of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration, also known as DARPA, that they found images of the area.

And those images, tonight, had proved to be dark as well. Blank. Devoid of any useful data.

And there was still no word from Krycek.

She realized she was standing in the dark, unconsciously running her fingers along her collarbone, expecting to find the chain and cross that she had worn for most of her lifetime. Mulder's absence was palpable in so many ways.

Behind her she heard the familiar sounds of the Gunmen's chatter interrupted by the deeper sound of Skinner's voice.

A question, and then she heard his measured steps walking toward her, the staccato sounds of his shoes against the concrete giving way to the crunch and slide of leather against gravel.

"Scully?"

She turned, shaking her head. "No..." trailing off as she saw from his eyes that he already knew. Byers, who seemed to be the only one who wasn't slightly afraid of Skinner, must have told him as soon as he came in.

She fought an urge to go to him and simply lean against him for awhile, to feel the strength of another human being, to share this sense of loss. No one else, she thought, really understood.

He watched her steadily, the faint reflection of the lights from the yard on his glasses turning him into an enigma.

"No word from Alex, either." It always surprised her when Skinner used Krycek's first name.

"No."

Skinner looked up at the stars, seeming to search for an answer among them, much as she had done earlier. He appeared to be weighing some momentous decision. He shifted a little, and when he looked at her again, there was no glare on his glasses, and she was amazed at the indecision she suddenly saw there.

"So, what now?" It hadn't occurred to her that he was also at the limits of his resources and ideas.

"I don't know."

"Me, neither."

Their shared silence was shattered by the ringing of the phone. The line for which only four people had the number, two of whom were standing in the star-filled night.

The caller was not Krycek.


	3. Chapter 3

_Somewhere in Oregon_

The advantage of working for the good guys, he'd realized, was, in general, far fewer people shot at you. Of course, it also meant you got to shoot fewer people. But, then, life is a series of compromises.

Krycek ducked behind a tree, counted to four, then sprinted madly across the clearing to the relative cover of a group of bushes on the far side. A bullet whined and thunked somewhere into the mud behind him.

Fuck. Not good. This was seriously not good.

Still, up to this point, there had been a heartening lack of weapons displayed so far on this little jaunt.

He was getting old, he reflected. Out of shape. Of course, even a month or two in a Tunisian penal colony is bound to have certain negative impacts on a person's body. You get a lot of practice fighting for your life, but there is limited opportunity for aerobic exercise--building up endurance.

He snorted as he began running through the woods again, zigging and zagging. Maybe he should retire and start a special conditioning camp for mercenaries. Fuck that Tae Bo shit, what you really needed in life was a class that taught late night woods sprinting and bullet avoidance.

He decided not only was he getting old, but hanging out with the wrong element--or was it the right element?--was clearly making him start to lose it.

He kept running.

Behind him, oddly, the sounds of pursuit gradually slowed and then faded to nothingness. It worried him. A lot. In his rather extensive experience in such matters, that usually meant something far more dangerous than men with automatic weapons was taking over the chase. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He ran until his lungs burned and breathing was almost impossible. When he finally slowed, he was still in the woods, but knew he was near the edge of them. Walking hurt, and he could hear his gasping, wheezing breaths shaking the stillness of the night. There had been a time when stealth was much easier.

Still no sounds behind him, or before him. What the hell was going on? This wasn't at all what he'd expected, but then, what was in the woods hadn't been anything he'd been expecting, either.

He began hearing the sounds of traffic, and realized he was only a few yards from the road. He paused just short of the tree line, watching, listening, trying to figure out what to do next. Waiting seemed like the best thing, but also the most dangerous. He needed to get out of here, but wasn't sure that emerging from the little cover he had was a great idea. He waited until he could draw two breaths in a row without feeling fire through his chest, and then casually sauntered out to the road side. Mile marker 352. Damn, he was two miles from his car. Oh well, what was a little more exercise tonight?

He started back, moving along the edge of the trees so he could easily duck back in to the woods if he needed to, or could sprint across the road if something came out of the woods. It was good to have options.

The night was pleasantly cool, and the sweat on his body rapidly cooled and then dried, leaving him slightly chilled and vaguely sticky, but nothing he couldn't live with. The stump of his arm ached--running with the prosthesis always chafed, but without it he always felt so unbalanced, unsymmetrical.

This had certainly been a wasted trip across the country. Well, not entirely, he'd gotten some interesting information, although it wasn't the information they'd hoped for, and it got them no closer to finding Mulder. On the upside, the trip had had the virtue of getting him out of DC for a while and away from those fruitcakes in the warehouse, and the weary suspicion in Scully's gaze.

It also bought him a momentary distance from Marita. He shivered, abruptly chilled in the night air. Damn that woman, she was so...so, what? He couldn't quite find the right word, but he knew on some deep animal, instinctual level she scared the shit out of him. Nothing overt, mind you. Her surfaces were seamless, the edges polished to glassy smoothness. Almost no cracks or imperfections. She radiated calm, helpful assistance. It was, he had decided almost as soon as he met her, a dangerous cover. There was something else there that he had yet to decipher.

If he looked hard, now, he could see a few fine lines on her face. Deep in her eyes lived just a hint of the terror and torture she had suffered through as a Consortium vaccine test subject. But he sometimes wondered if he could only see those things because he wanted to. Because he had lived through the same things and needed to believe that she, too, must have been marked by the experience.

He thought the others probably saw nothing but her calm confidence, her air of certainty. He knew there was turmoil beneath that surface, but carefully controlled, and leashed. She might be one of the most dangerous people he had ever known, which was saying something. He only wished he could figure out who that danger would ultimately be directed at. In moments when he was being honest with himself, he would admit that it was the sense of danger she radiated at almost unseeable levels, more than anything else, that had attracted him to her in the first place. He'd always liked playing with fire. He had the scars to prove it.

He'd left her for dead in that facility, and had not regretted it. It would have been a convenient severing of the tangled bond they'd forged. Leaving him once more completely unencumbered and unfettered. It would have uncomplicated things.

It hadn't worked out the way he'd wanted, like so many of the half-formed and quickly conceived plans in his life. And when she'd shown up like some hallucinatory mirage in the Tunisian hellhole where he'd been rotting, he'd thought maybe she tracked him down simply for the pleasure of killing him herself. As usual, she managed to surprise him.

That she came as the smoking man's lackey was both surprising and worrisome. It did not fit with what he knew of her, or at least suspected her of. He knew that she knew more than she had ever let on about the scope and breadth of the conspiracy's plans, and had always had the distinct impression that maybe she was some kind of mole for yet another shadow group. Some outside power that existed somewhere between the official bureaucracies of agencies like the FBI and Interpol, and the deep shadows of the old men's conspiracy.

There was a duality about her that he recognized, knowing it in himself. She had other loyalties, but he could never figure out to whom or what. On some days he wondered if he'd simply let his imagination run wild and that she was nothing more than the unambitious assistant that she always seemed to be. But then they would talk in the dead of the night, exhausted from bouts of wild fucking, and her words would betray a mind that was twisted, devious and illuminated by an intelligence that made him shiver. And then the next morning, in daylight, she would once again be nothing more than Ms. Covarrubias, who did the research and delivered the messages. She was like a set of parallel mirrors, reflecting images back into each other into infinity, only as you looked into the mirrors, the images of her at two and three levels back became blurred, indistinct, almost as though they were reflecting an entirely different shape.

This time had been no different. She remained a cipher. She had arrived as apparently nothing more than an efficient functionary of someone else's plans. She had arranged his release and travel out of Tunisia with a ruthless efficiency that left him breathless. She'd alternately bribed, threatened and flirted with appropriate officials, and within 6 hours of her appearance in the Porj he found himself on a plane bound for New York, with a London stopover.

After her one small flash of emotion on first seeing him, she'd said almost nothing else. She'd provided a few more details during their discussion in the shower room in the prison. Then they'd journeyed back the US with barely a dozen more words exchanged between them. He knew only that he had been summoned back to the world of the shadow games by the smoking man, and that somehow Marita was also involved.

Twice he'd nearly apologized for leaving her, but the words died silently in the face of her implacable silence and the flat nothingness in her eyes when her gaze glanced past him. It was as if she'd smothered her fury at him under some blanket of asbestos indifference. He thought, however, that he would still face some kind of reckoning from her.

In the meantime, there were proving to be certain benefits to resuming a relationship with her. Danger really was the ultimate aphrodisiac.

A truck rushed by on the road, and Krycek found himself unconsciously shifting deeper into the woods. So much to think about. So many variables and this trip hadn't made sorting out all the puzzle pieces any easier.

He was half-way back to the car when it occurred to him it might not be there, or there might be people watching it. He stopped, trying to consider his options. Fuck it, he'd go back to the car and if there were people there he'd deal with them when he got there. He was tired of trying to predict what his life, even in the next 15 minutes, would hold.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_Naranja, Florida_

The public park was overrun with families and children. A cool front had arrived out of nowhere, bringing with it a brief, welcome relief in the oppressive heat and humidity of the early South Florida summer. It was an afternoon for picnicking.

Shrieks and giggles of children chasing each other around the grassy areas mingled with the low chatter of work-weary adults who drank their beers, and talked about all the work issues they'd sworn they weren't even going to think about this weekend.

Frisbees sailed with lazy grace, decorating the sky with orange, green, blue streaks. Hamburgers and hot dogs grilled on barbecues, the hazy sharp smell of smoke drifting and mingling with the scents of sunblock, sweat, and warm grass. Dogs slept in the shade. Teen lovers snuck off to the relative privacy of the bushes while their parents shrugged and watched their furtive disappearance with an amused melancholy. Let them have their fun--the realities of 60-hour work weeks and mortgages would come all too soon.

The bees came from the west end of the park. The low hum first mistaken for an over-zealous gardener starting up a weed-whacker. But the hum became a buzz and then a growl, and the giggles of children became shrieks, and the blue skies were blotted out by roiling, terrifying cloud of black and yellow.

In all, 80 were attacked--swarmed, covered with living suits of buzzing nightmares. The chaos of the scene was impossible to imagine or recount afterward. People could only resort to cliches: "I don't know how to describe it...." "It was unbelievable..." " I never saw them coming..."

It was only later, when the media began covering every emergency room in town, and showing the pictures of the pathetically tiny victims, that they realized only children had been stung. Each child had received over 100 bites. No one over the age of 18 reported so much as a single sting.

Miraculously, not a single child died.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Krycek's car was exactly where he'd left it. There were no footprints except his own in the soft ground around the vehicle, and he watched the car for a long time from the cover of the woods before finally approaching it.

It did not explode when he started the engine which he considered a good sign.

It occurred to him that the responsible thing to do would be to call the others. Give them an update on his lack of progress and find out if there had been any new developments in this area since he'd bugged out to investigate the energy surges the geeks had found out about from their weird little Internet friends.

He was not feeling particularly responsible. Anyway, nothing he could tell them would be very helpful at this point, and he was ready to go home. Home? DC was home? Interesting. Maybe not so much 'home,' as away from this fucking fiasco. And, maybe back in DC he'd at least be able to get in on some decent action.

Alex had realized a long time ago that he what he longed for most in life was action. To be in motion, to avoid the deadly periods of calm, quiet, and above all, contemplation. He did not want to think. He wanted to have an objective and a plan and timetable for achieving it.

It was sitting around thinking that invariably got him in trouble. He wasn't stupid, but he had never quite learned to control his impulses. To think through the long-term and short-term consequences of his random moves. Short-term gratification was always too attractive, and he'd snatch any opportunity, only later realizing that he'd traded away much larger winnings in favor of the immediate profit.

Still, by and large, he'd done reasonably well. In the wake of the Antarctica disaster and the Consortium's loss of that ship, the Brit's words that "survival is the ultimate ideology," had been widely quoted in the smoke-filled rooms that echoed with recriminations and blame-laying. It was a fitting epitaph, and the first time Krycek heard it, he'd whispered back to himself, recognizing, with a small shock, his personal philosophy distilled into five words.

It wasn't only survival, though, it was the joy of leaping recklessly into action. Anticipating the thrill of a chase, terrorizing someone into submission, or stealing the artifact that he could sell and finally get away from it all. Only he knew, deep in his soul, that retirement wasn't really all it was cracked up to be.

The joy of action is precisely what had brought him out here to Oregon this time. The simple satisfaction of movement, doing something, anything, rather than listen to the three stooges yammer endlessly about beta band transmissions, low energy radiation, and conspiracies. Some of their theories were amusing, of course, but they were such children in their imaginings, and he found himself strangely reluctant to open their eyes to the true darkness that threatened to swallow them all.

And, what had this trip netted him? Exactly nothing. Or at least, a lot of not-useful-right-now things. He'd found that compound in the woods, and had been unable to resist sending the glowing 'X Marks the Spot' map back to Scully and boys. It should have been the answer. It certainly, from the initial distance that he was able to survey it, seemed to fit the profile of a Consortium research or abductee compound.

But it wasn't.

He'd managed to get past the first perimeter of guards, and onto the base. Working quietly toward an area that looked like it was a barracks of some kind, he'd nearly been discovered by a group of soldiers patrolling. They wore uniforms that had no insignia at all, and he was astonished to hear them speaking a strange mishmash of English and Russian.

Three hours of careful scouting later, and he had his answer.

It was a covert base, no question about that, but it turned out to be a debriefing camp for fucking Russian former KGB and military defectors. From the bits of conversation he picked up, and the handful of documents he was able to glimpse in one colonel's office he slipped into, it appeared that these defectors were flying in stolen experimental aircraft.

The once-proud Soviet military had turned into slowly crumbling disaster, but money from somewhere was still financing some rather interesting experimental weapons development. In particular, the Russian Air Force had found some deep pockets to finance the R&D of airplanes that were even more invisible to radar than the American Stealth fighters. Or, so the documents in the colonel's office suggested.

Krycek's Russian had been learned in boyhood and was mostly idiomatic; his technical vocabulary was weak. There were words in the documents describing these planes that the defectors had flown in that he couldn't quite decode. He was left with the sense, though, that this wasn't merely cutting edge technology, but somehow that the crafts were partly organic. It didn't make sense to him, but he realized that there was little point standing there trying to figure it out. The base was interesting, but obviously wasn't going to lead him to Mulder. Maybe he'd come back later.

He left the base as quietly as he'd entered. There was something fishy about the structures and the aircraft that he'd been able to glimpse through the open doors of some of the heavily guarded hangars on the compound. Something about the shape and color of the flyers that tugged at his memory but wouldn't resolve into anything useable.

One craft in particular caught his eye--huge, trapezoidal, gunmetal grey with strange blue markings--completely unaerodynamic, it didn't even look like it could or would fly. And yet looking at it, he felt a strange ache in the pit of his stomach, almost as though he were experiencing the drag of G-forces as he lifted up through the atmosphere. He found himself moving toward it with no recollection of having decided to breach the hangar's perimeter. He stopped himself and backed away, checking over his shoulder to make sure he hadn't been observed. Had he been prone to imagining such things, he might have said that it called to him. He was not prone to such things.

He kept moving, quietly, quickly away and back toward the back corner of the fence he'd been able to climb over.

It wasn't until he was past the outer fence that he'd screwed up. He'd assumed he was in the clear and had just headed out across country back toward his car, when he'd run almost headlong into a foot patrol unit. He'd had about 3 seconds warning of their presence, so he had already been on the move by the time they realized there was an intruder.

It still worried him vaguely that they had given up pursuit so easily. He shrugged to himself; maybe they got the occasional teenage hikers and just needed to scare them badly enough to not come back.

Whatever. He was out and alive, and that was victory enough for tonight. He'd watch the rearview mirror carefully on his drive back to the airport, and worry about contacting his...partners in the morning.


	4. Chapter 4

_The Gunmen's warehouse_

"No, I don't want you to bring it down here." Frohike was hunched over the phone. His voice seemed to be torn between bemusement and fright, and the knuckles of the hand that clutched the receiver were literally white.

"No." He looked up as Skinner and Scully re-entered the warehouse, an unreadable emotion blurring his features. "Look. I still think you have the wrong person. I don't have an Uncle Chester. Never did."

Scully looked over at Byers and raised her eyebrows in question. Byers shrugged and shook his head. Apparently nobody knew what the hell was going on.

"Okay, okay, fine. If you're in that big a hurry. We'll be here." He placed the receiver back in its cradle and just sat looking at it.

Langly was practically vibrating with impatience. "Well? Who was it? What's with the Uncle Chester thing? I thought both your parents were only children? What's this dude bringing down? How'd he find this place?" The breach in their careful security was only an afterthought.

Frohike was still staring at the phone as he answered. "That was some lawyer dude named Penders. Or so he said. Claimed to represent my late Uncle Chester who died recently and left me a legacy." He shook his head again. "I don't know how the hell he found me. And I don't have an Uncle Chester."

He looked up, confusion now the predominant emotion. "I don't know what to tell you. The dude knew exactly where we were. And he insisted that he had to bring me this thing tonight."

Scully felt Skinner move sharply beside her. His voice was tight with a harsh urgency that reminded her that nothing could be trusted. "You think this is a trap? What is this 'legacy' that the lawyer wants to bring you? What time did he say he was coming?"

Frohike looked like a deer in headlights under Skinner's intense glare. "I don't know, man. I never heard of this guy before. I swear to you, I have never had an Uncle Chester. It must be a mistake. He's got to have me confused with someone else."

Everyone stood in uncomfortable silence that was finally broken by Langly breaking away and loping toward the back of the warehouse.

"Langly?" Byers called after him. "What are you doing?"

"Getting the fuck out of here. What do you think? That dork," he jerked his head back toward the despondent Frohike, "just told the dude to come on down. I'm not waiting around for the men in black to come crashing through the doors." He snatched a duffel bag and began quickly stuffing random items into it. Grabbing whatever his hands touched and throwing it in the bright green bag.

Frohike shook himself out of his stunned reverie and moved over to the bank of computers that were arrayed on the tables in the middle of the space. His hand was reaching to turn off the first one when Scully stopped them. She had found some measure of clarity out there in the night air. She could feel quick impatience at their panic rising up through her.

"Stop it!" She was surprised to find a sharp tone of command in her voice. Langly dropped the bag, startled into paralysis. She'd even surprised Skinner, she thought.

"Look, someone clearly knows we're here. If They, whoever they are today, wanted to take us out, they wouldn't use a complicated ruse like some imaginary uncle of Frohike's. If they wanted to, they would have simply blown up this whole block, right?" She waited for that to sink in for a moment.

She felt rather than saw Skinner's nod of assent behind her.

"I think we should just wait and see what this is all about. Maybe someone is actually trying to help us. We've had help from unusual sources before..." Her voice trailed off as she thought about the number of people who had tried, or seemed to try to help her and Mulder over the years and how many of them had wound up dead.

"Anyway--both Krycek and Marita are out there checking into things, maybe they had to go through an intermediary to get us some information." It was a weaker explanation, she knew, but not implausible.

"I don't know. I still think we ought to get the hell out of here." Langly's edginess was catching and she could see both Byers and Frohike casting worried glances toward the front entrance.

Skinner stepped forward. "I don't particularly like it either, but," he ticked off the points on his blunt fingers, "one, it looks like someone has found us. Two, I agree with Scully that if they wanted to take us out they could have found a far more efficient way of doing it than this. And, three, whatever this stuff is, it could be useful. We should take precautions, but let's just accept the delivery."

"Easy for you to say, Skinner, you're not the one who's going to have to deal with this lawyer dude and maybe get his head blown off." Frohike was not impressed by the arguments.

Skinner shrugged, staring down at the nervous man. "The lawyer doesn't know who you are. I'll take the delivery if it'll make you feel better."

"It'll help, but I'm starting to be with Langly. Maybe we should just cut and run and retire to Maui."

The ringing of the door buzzer cut off further arguments. A scan of the video surveillance units at all doors revealed only a thin, balding man carrying a box at the front entrance.

Frohike jerked his head at Skinner, who sighed and went to open the door.

"Yes?" Skinner was not giving any ground.

"Good evening. I'm Larry Penders, I'm here to see Mr. Melvin Frohike about the legacy from his late Uncle Chester."

"I'm Melvin Frohike."

The lawyer's pale blue eyes expressed mild surprise. "I was under the impression that you would be....er.....not quite so tall."

"I hit my growing spurt since Uncle Chester saw me last."

"Ah," the cultured tones were smooth, no trace of an accent, "so you remember your uncle?"

Skinner was clearly enjoying messing with the lawyer. "Not really, but since I don't remember him, I can only assume that he last saw me when I was an infant. By the way, how did you get this number?" His grin was positively feral. Scully was suddenly glad she was on the other side of it.

Penders seemed mesmerized. "I was given it when I got the instructions to contact you on behalf of my firm about your uncle. We've handled his business affairs for years."

"Your firm?"

"Yes, Schmidt, Klein and Waldham."

Skinner narrowed his eyes, and seemed to be deciding whether to ask the guy for identification. Instead, he inched a step forward, nearly touching the box the lawyer held. "Is that my legacy?"

"Er...", the lawyer glanced down at the object in his hands, as if suddenly remembering why he'd come. He thrust it forward as far he could. Skinner didn't move at all. "Here. Your uncle was sure you would need this."

Scully moved forward smoothly. "Did Fro....Melvin's uncle have any other messages for him?" She placed a hand lightly on Skinner's arm.

Penders looked at her, dazed, seeming to wonder if she'd materialized out of thin air. "And you are?"

"A friend of the family."

"Hmmm...Uh, no. There weren't any other messages. Here." He pushed the box toward Skinner again, who automatically brought his hands up to hold it. "I'm sorry for your loss. Good night."

Watching Penders walk away, Skinner mused, "He didn't ask me to sign anything. Didn't ask me to prove I was Frohike. Something's wrong. And I'm left holding this damn box, and I suddenly wonder if it might contain a bomb. Scully, you might want to move away from me now." His tone never varied, polite, almost conversational.

Tired of it all, she simply reached over and took the box from his hands, walked it over to the table, where she put it down, none too gently--she was amused at the flinch that Byers couldn't suppress at the muted thump the box made hitting the surface--and opened the cardboard flaps.

In the box was a small antique wooden chest. In the chest was two million dollars in cash and instructions for accessing an off-shore account in the name of Melvin J. Frohike at the Banco Verde Bahamas. The account had eight million dollars in it.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_Foum Tatouine, Tunisia_

The desert was endless, barren, completely predictable in its sandy sameness. Unvarying in its indifferent harshness, unyielding heat and unceasing blowing sand. They had changed all that.

The older man had never quite lost his German accent, despite his fluidity in at least five other languages, despite the fact that it had been over 40 years since he last set foot anywhere near the Fatherland.

"Don't worry--what little is left of Them has forgotten we or this project are here. The fires that destroyed my former colleagues burned more than just their bodies. Whole systems and empires were reduced to cinders in that immolation."

"But--"

"Yes, there were survivors, but I have never considered Aston a real player. There is still that American....the smoker, Spender, or whatever he calls himself these days, but he was always a flunkie, a mere functionary. He never had the nerve or vision to truly take action."

He turned away momentarily, gazing out over the surprising green rows of vegetation, springing bright and surreal from the desert floor. He seemed, today, uncharacteristically uncertain, almost hesitant. When he resumed speaking, his listener had to move slightly closer to catch the words.

"But there has been recent...activity. We are going to have to step up our work. The preliminary vector tests have all gone well, and I think our casualty rate is acceptable."

A sigh beside him broke his reverie.

"Yes, yes, I know--in a perfect world, there would be no casualties from this, but it is an imperfect world, and we are rapidly running out of time and options." A brief pause while he studied the man next to him. "Your....all of your idealism always surprises me. An unexpected thing."

He shrugged away his apparent puzzlement. "I long ago learned that science is full of the unexpected."

"Anyway, with the recent activity in North America, I feel we are at a cross-roads. A month or two at most, and we will have to be prepared to go fully live."

The man next to him finally spoke, "What about the information from that mercenary? The man with one arm who was here a few months ago. I thought we agreed that we would be given more time to work on the information he brought to us. We have nearly finished decrypting the data that he brought us from the ship. Even the little information we managed to decode and incorporate a month ago made the second round of tests far more effective."

The German lifted his hat and ran a hand over his face, up over his scalp. Weariness informed every line in his body. "I know--I wish we had more time, but we don't. We will soon, I think, be faced with the choice of saving most people, or none. What would you choose?" He did not wait for an answer, but plowed ruthlessly on.

"Besides, we are still missing one critical piece of the information, and that mercenary is in the penal colony in Porj Sidi Toui. At least the last I heard. We can't go and question him without possibly alerting the remnants of the organization I used to belong to. We both know that is an unacceptable risk."

Blue eyes met blue eyes for a long tense moment.

Finally the younger man averted his gaze. "I know. I just...."

The German took pity on his colleague. "Try not to think about it. This is not an easy decision, but it isn't yours, so don't take on the guilt. There is no time for such foolish, bourgeois luxuries. Events have been set in motion, and we have only the choice to react, or be reduced to ashes like our former associates. Yes, a terrible cost will be paid, but those cost-benefit calculations are not really your concern. There are reasons that you are the scientist and I am the manager."

Anger sparked briefly. "Maybe because I was engineered that way."

"Maybe, but it's more than that. It's simply that engineered or not, we all have different talents. It's what makes us human."

The pale skin freckled so badly in the desert sun. The brown spots shifted and blurred as the younger man snarled at him. "A poor choice of words."

"Not really. I always choose my words carefully."

Strughold watched the red-haired man wheel around and stalk away.

~ ~ ~ ~

_Somewhere near DC_

A talent for organization is what had first brought her to the attention of the group that eventually owned her soul. Or at least tried to own it. It is a dangerous thing, being  
ruthlessly efficient, but also useful.

Marita Covarrubias put down the phone with a grim satisfaction. Done. Now they would have operating capital.

Men. Always rushing off into the great unknown without considering the logistics. The practicalities of how they would pay for plane tickets and rental cars. Illegal bribes to appropriate and inappropriate officials. Besides, there was a certain sweet irony to plundering one of the smoking man's various off-shore accounts to finance this effort to put a stop to his "legacy."

It worried her slightly that the first account she had tapped to provide Frohike's inheritance had been emptied very recently. It shouldn't have been. She had checked the balances of all the accounts just hours before the smoker's death, and each had been well over $10 million. The empty account gave her a mild headache--a premonition of another wild card out there, but she pushed it aside.

The smoker was right--the time was at hand, and she couldn't afford to spend too much of it worrying about variables over which she had no control.

A talent for organization underpinned with a ruthless practicality and an ability to discard all moral judgments or considerations on her way to achieving her goal.

She sighed in the quiet room, smelling the soft scents of expensive leather and the sweet dust of old books. She would miss her library, her sanctuary, but if Skinner and Scully and the rest of them didn't accomplish their mission, there would be no sanctuary left for anyone anywhere.

She sighed again. It really didn't seem to matter which side she was working for, they still seemed to need someone to clean up after them.

She wondered briefly how Dana Scully put up with it all, then decided she didn't care. There was so much she didn't care about. And, there were other matters to attend to.

She picked up the phone again, dialed one of the dozens of numbers she had memorized, and waited patiently for the answer.

On the fifth ring, a sleepy voice answered, rough, deep, "Yes."

"It's me," cool, controlled, as ever. "Did you verify the information?"

"Yes, I've just returned from the second site. There's no question that it's the same test pattern, but the results are...different. I haven't finished analyzing all the data yet--" 

She felt a fine edge of impatience cutting through. Just once she would like to deal with someone who didn't always make excuses. "When will you have the results? What do you mean different?"

"There were no fatalities at site two, and only 15% fatalities at site one, and those mostly among victims 50 and older."

She thought she had moved beyond surprise. "No fatalities at site two? How is that possible?"

"I don't know. I'm still working on the samples. We know that the pathogen has mutated once before, but I honestly don't understand what this is. Or exactly where it came from. I thought all the labs had been shut down." He was becoming agitated; scientists were such a fragile lot. She needed him to calm down, to concentrate on the important developments.

Lying had become second nature so many years ago that it was almost first nature. She adopted her most soothing tone. "I thought so, too. And, we're not even sure it's one of our labs. There were always other projects on the fringes of the larger work. Anyway, we need to figure out what we're dealing with first."

"Well, I should have results within 48 hours."

"Call me with the results in 24 hours."

She hung up the phone with a quiet click. She could wait 24 hours more. There were other events to set in motion in the meantime.

She glanced at her watch. Alex would be back in town in less than 6 hours. Furious, empty-handed, confused over exactly what it was he had found, and he would find his way here. She was not entirely displeased at the prospect.

Theirs had been like any other office romance--partly fueled by the thrill of the illicit, the temptation of the forbidden. The shadow masters had known about it, of course, and disapproved in their stuffy, tweed and smoke way. But neither Marita nor Alex had been considered important enough to bother reprimanding.

Their encounters were sporadic, fierce. Their couplings felt like lightning strikes of energy streaking through them, leaving them shattered, twisted tree branches cast to the ground in beds in anonymous hotels in cities across the world.

On her most rational level, she knew that the liaison with Alex had always been a mistake--he was a survivor, not useful as a long term partner. He was ridiculously bad at strategic planning. If she'd had his full level of access she would have owned the universe by now. Literally. But the conspiracy had been the ultimate boys club, and at critical moments she was always excluded. Alex had so many opportunities and had continually squandered them for small short-term gains. Not her ideal mate, certainly.

But, he was beautiful, and she was a woman who appreciated beauty. And he had an array of interesting talents in bed.

Since she'd yanked him out of that Tunisian hellhole, he had been spectacularly attentive--had very nearly made up for abandoning her to die in that medical facility. No, not really, but she was certainly enjoying his quite transparent efforts to make her forget what a rat bastard he could be. It had amused her to see his obvious confusion when she'd casually reinitiated their physical relationship. She thought he probably fell asleep most nights wondering if she would murder him as he slept. And yet, he kept coming back to her bed.

Let him grovel a while longer, she could at least enjoy herself on this final journey through the shadows. She decided to go take a nap. With any luck, she would get very little sleep tonight.

In the meantime, she had one last task for the day. She opened her email program. What was that American rhyme? Eenie, meeny, miney, mo....catch a computer hacker by his toe. It was....Byers' turn. Yes, Byers, with his serious demeanor, and sweetly out-of-date suits would appreciate the significance of these emails.

She had just finished composing and sending the two emails--one apparently from Florida, and second from Italy--when the familiar beep alerted her to incoming messages.

The data in the first transmission stopped her cold for a long moment. This was unexpected. Extremely unexpected.

The second message unfroze her--jolted her into movement--her reaction propelling her out of her chair, and into restless pacing around the room. Desperately trying to use physical movement to burn away the sudden nervousness and fright.

Too soon. This was much too soon.


	5. Chapter 5

_AD Skinner's Office_

It seemed to Skinner that he was always indoors--in windowless conference rooms, artificially lighted warehouses, or in his car passing between one or the other. Time blurred and collapsed around the edges until he never knew what day of the week it was, let alone what time it was. He had only the vague sense that it was always too late, or too early.

So it was a shock to find someone in his office.

A hasty glance at his watch indicated it was 10:30 in the morning, a not so unreasonable time to have a visitor. Given that he'd passed a number of agents in the hallways on his way back to his office, he assumed it must be a week day.

It still didn't explain why there was an United States Air Force Colonel standing in his office.

"Can I help you, Colonel?"

The man in blue turned sharply toward Skinner, but did not salute. "Colonel James Rodden of the United States Air Force, 2nd Battalion, Intelligence section. Are you Assistant Director Walter Skinner of the FBI?"

Skinner suppressed the impulse to reply that, no, he was Elmer Fudd of the CIA, and provided the simplest possible answer. "Yes." His tone no doubt betrayed both impatience and a slight hostility. It was how he viewed the world these days.

Col. Rodden was about 5 feet, 10 inches tall and looked like he'd probably held the state wrestling championship in whatever state he'd grown up in. The uniform did nothing to disguise the tightly compacted muscles that framed his body. He bore no resemblance to those strangely over-inflated men who spent hours a day in the gym. He simply looked like he could very casually rip your arm out of its socket without breaking a sweat, and that he just might enjoy doing it. His skin was the color of Starbucks espresso and his eyes were colder than permafrost.

Skinner had no doubt which sub-section of Intelligence Col. Rodden belonged to.

"You've been running some investigations in the woods of Oregon, near Bellefleur." His tone was also compact, precise. Skinner waited. There was undoubtedly more.

"We understand that you have a manhunt underway for one Special Agent Fox Mulder. He's not there. We suggest you look elsewhere." It was not exactly a suggestion.

Skinner considered the gamut of responses that he could make to the suggestion and decided that none were particularly optimal.

"I see." He watched Col. Rodden for a long steady minute, then shrugged. "Okay."

Col. Rodden's eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. "OK? That's it?" His tone, although mild, suggested disbelief. "This isn't a joke or a test, Skinner."

"I never thought it was. I appreciate the information--if Mulder isn't out there, then we're wasting valuable manpower, and I can redirect the resources." His tone, too, remained mild. He looked at the floor for a moment, and then almost casually looked up again and asked, "Do you have any suggestions about where I should be looking for him?"

He was surprised to realize that he'd caught Rodden off guard. There was a shade of delay before Rodden answered, "No. But I can assure you that your man isn't where you have your agents or that unofficial investigator looking. You should redirect your resources away from an area that could wind up getting one of your agents in a different sort of trouble." Another brief pause. "And, you should probably be more careful about sending that particular unofficial individual out on his own. He might wind up losing something valuable, like another appendage. Or, he might sell you out." Rodden's tone indicated that he didn't find either scenario particularly upsetting. He was delivering another message entirely.

Skinner allowed himself to count to three before reacting. He wasn't exactly sure what it meant that Rodden would reference Krycek and the unofficial investigation so openly, but he was sure it wasn't good news. It also raised a couple of interesting questions about whose message Rodden was actually delivering.

"Thank you for your concern." Skinner permitted himself the tiniest edge of sarcasm. "It's so rare to have this level of cooperation between Executive Agencies." His eyes narrowed. "Officially or unofficially." He waited to see if there were any other messages the colonel would deliver.

Rodden looked through him for an interminable while, and then pivoted sharply and walked out of the office. At the door, without turning back, Rodden added. "And Skinner? There's very little of interest in Alaska, either."

Alaska? Who the hell was in the Alaska? What the hell was in Alaska? By the time Skinner realized that he was sure there was no search for Mulder underway in Alaska, Rodden had long since vanished.

 

The day dragged on forever, a steady flow of administrivia, meaningless update meetings, and the petty annoyances that define the life of a federal bureaucrat. It struck Skinner, not for the first time, that he was eligible to retire. Between his military service, and his time in the Bureau, he had enough years in federal service to retire with a pension. It seemed more and more attractive.

Driving from the Hoover Building across the bridge to Alexandria that night, he was momentarily distracted by the dark play of the water of the Potomac. He thought about the quiet cabin by the lake in Michigan where he and Sharon had once spent a summer vacation. He remembered a time when things had been simpler. He remembered that time flowed only in one direction and that the present was anything but simple.

He arrived at the warehouse to find barely controlled chaos.

"And don't you go fucking cowboying off into the wild blue yonder again, Krycek. We will decide who is best suited for the mission, got it?" Scully's voice was raised in uncharacteristic vehemence.

Ah, so Alex was back.

Krycek muttered something in response to Scully, and two people instantly responded. He thought he heard Frohike's voice, but it was Marita's words that cut through as he walked in the side entrance.

"That's scarcely the point, Alex. This is personal for you, as well, as I recall. Anyway, this mission is likely to require some specific expertise and access that I'm not sure you have anymore. This isn't some little camping trip in the Oregon woods."

Krycek started to reply and then lapsed into a slightly sulky silence.

Byers cut in, "I'm not sure we should be talking about just one mission. There's the other emails that we got..."

He was cut off by Frohike, "Look, we've got limited resources..."

Langly joined the fray, "No, we don't, you just got all that moolah, and..."

"Hey--shut up, it's mine, but I meant people, you moron. Yeah, we can use the cash for tickets and shit, but who's actually going to get on these planes to go check out all these so-called clues? How's your Italian, hacker boy?"

Krycek seemed to recover from his sulk, "You're all idiots if you think I have any desire to go up there into a frozen wasteland and get chased by more men with guns...."

Scully picked up her thread again, "Did I say you were going anywhere?"

"Listen, you..."

"HEY! What the fuck is going on?!" Skinner's roar overrode all the babble, which cut off like a door being slammed, until all that was left was the slight echo of Skinner's words rattling around the far corners of the warehouse. 

He hadn't yelled at anyone in a very long time. He'd forgotten how good it felt.

Everyone except Marita started to speak again, and he cut them off with an abrupt gesture. "Scully?"

"Well, sir, we have a bit of situation. There's the information in from Italy and Florida, but that really seems to be of secondary importance to the new data from north of Fairbanks. The decision to be made, of course, is which of us to send, and how to cover our tracks. If Krycek goes..." her words tumbled over each other--a headlong rush. He could hear the tight thread of anger weaving through her voice again, could see the tension building back as quickly as it had dissipated.

"Scully?"

"Sir?"

"I just got here. You're going to have to back up. What information from Italy and Florida and what the hell does Alaska have to do with any of this?" He thought again of Col. Rodden's visit and felt his gut beginning to tighten.

"Oh. I'm sorry. I forgot we didn't have a chance to brief you by phone on your way over. We couldn't get through." She tilted her head slightly. "Is there something wrong with your phone?"

"No, I was on the phone with Freeh." At her surprised query, "Director Freeh?" he motioned for her to continue. "I'll explain later."

She paused for a moment, gathering her thoughts. The others waited behind her, arrayed in a strangely formal semi-circle. A restless chorus to her narrator. The Gunmen on the left side of the arc--Frohike, Langly and then Byers; a small gap and then Marita and Alex, who always stood just at the edge of each other's personal space.

"Late this afternoon, Byers received two emails that seemed to report the results of some kind of test. The emails reported on separate, but similar, events in Sicily, Italy, and a south Florida town called Naranja. The test subjects appear to be essentially random civilians, and the method of the test seems to involve swarms of bees." She was looking at him directly as she delivered the news, and it was impossible for him to hide his reaction.

He instinctively looked over at Marita, to find her watching him with her usual cool facade, but for just a moment, he thought he saw a strange flash of emotion swim through her eyes.

He looked back at Scully. "Did the civilians develop blisters and fevers and die?" He couldn't bring himself to mention the specter of smallpox. And then, because honesty with Scully was an old habit, "We've seen something like this before. A couple of years ago, it was during your...."

"I know, sir. I remember reading Mulder's notes on the case when I got out of the hospital. But that's the strange thing. Like that attack in South Carolina, the victims of the bees were primarily children, but in Florida, not a single child died, and in Italy, very few people died, and they were all older, and tended to have other health risks."

Once again, he found himself seeking out Marita's eyes, almost as though he were trying to get her to weigh in on this discussion. She shook her head, her face calm and smooth as always. Skinner mused that Marita had an eerie knack of seeming so confident that no one would ever really question her. Even Krycek seemed vaguely afraid of her. He thought he'd never met anyone more confident and sure of herself. Even Scully, by comparison, seemed almost volatile, a loose cannon. Marita was nearly inhuman in her patience. He wondered at what cost it had been acquired. After a brief pause, Marita responded to his silent inquiry.

"I don't know. The Consortium was experimenting with bees as a vector for spreading the alien virus. Agent Scully, you were caught up in that whole process, as you may recall. But the domes were all destroyed, so far as I know, and after the...incident, in Anarctica, the men never spoke of the bees again. Alex? Do you know anything?" Her bland tone did not quite cover the subtle jibe.

"The labs in Arizona were the only other place where the bee project was still being worked on. But the work was still in an experimental phase. They were completely re-engineering how the virus would be carried, and all those experiments were burned when the rebel aliens took out the lab a year ago."

Skinner had the impression that the Alex's information had actually surprised Marita.

"Okay, so what happened with these bees? What do we think it all means?" He found himself longing for the days when he had run investigations that had mundane clues: bits of clothing, fiber, blood, footprints.

Scully glanced back at Marita before continuing. "We're not sure. In the email about the Florida attack, there were some attachments that appear to be followup notes by doctors on the victims--all of whom, by the way, were children. The notes are from different medical professionals, but each says that despite receiving numerous bee stings, so many that most of these children should have died from sheer insect venom overload, the children have quickly and almost miraculously recovered completely. Most of the writeups go on to say something like this...."

She walked over to the computer table, picked up a printout. "This is from a 12-year old girl's family physician. It's typical of the dozen or so reports that were forwarded to us." She read:

_Sandy is doing very well. I have discontinued the antihist_  
treatment, and see no signs that she will have any scars from  
the numerous stings that covered her body. In fact, I am  
surprised by how few of the stings are still visible at all. I  
am also a bit surprised by Sandy's psychological and emotional  
reaction to all this. She seems, just in a few days, more quiet  
and thoughtful. I suppose that such a traumatic experience  
would change anyone, but the depth of her questions, and the  
complexity of the explanations that she understood surprised me.  
I've known her all her life and it seems like she suddenly  
matured overnight. 

She looked up at him again, her features slightly blurred by fatigue, worry and confusion.

"What about the information from Italy?"

"Very much the same." She looked at Marita again, a sharp suspicion briefly evident. "Fortunately, Ms. Covarrubias knows Italian, and was able to translate that information for us."

A woman of many talents, indeed.

Scully continued. "The only difference in Italy, and there was much sketchier medical data available from that incident, is there appear to be greater incidence of side effects among some of the adolescents. I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but there are reports in the files from Italy that after the attack, some of the teenagers were reporting hearing 'strange voices' in their heads. The local physician was worried about trauma-induced schizophrenia, but it didn't fit the classical pattern. The voices phenomenon lasted only a few days, though, for most of the youth. Only two of the 50 or so teens continued to report them a week after the attack. From what we can gather, the Sicilian attack took place about two weeks before the incident in Florida." 

"When did the Florida attack occur?"

"Ten days ago."

He considered all that he'd been told, and couldn't find a thread to connect the information to anything else they'd been working on. He and Mulder had run into the bees, but this didn't feel like anything that would lead them back to the missing agent. A thought nagged at him.

"What about Alaska? Where does that fit in?"

"Alaska?" She was clearly still thinking about the bees. "Oh--that. It doesn't. At least we don't think it does."

She turned to Byers. "You want to explain about the readings?"

Byers stepped forward. He always seemed a little awkward, just slightly off-center, as though he wanted to be anywhere but where he was, and might simply turn and walk out, away from all the madness. And, as ever, when he began speaking, Skinner had the sense of a professor launching into a lecture.

"We had just finished looking at the data on the bee attacks in Florida and Italy, when we got another high priority email from an anonymous source." He paused and looked at Langly, who just shrugged. Apparently the plethora of untraceable emails had ceased to worry them too much.

"This email detailed a series of sightings up in Alaska of unknown flying objects. Moreover, a check of the European Space Agency satellites and the JPL orbiters showed the same anomalous readings we saw in Oregon right before you and Agent Mulder went back there. The readings in Alaska were bouncing around for a while, but have been holding steady in an area about 200 miles north of Fairbanks for the last 6 hours. We think there's another ship there."

Byers stopped for a moment and caught and held Scully's glance before he continued.

"There's more. We took a look at the last 72 hours of data from JPL and the ESA. It's intermittent, but there is a clear path for the readings up to Alaska. It looks very much like the ship or whatever it is, originated in Oregon."

Skinner felt his breath leave him.

"Do you think it's the same one?" He turned to Krycek. "What did you see out there?"

"Nothing alien. At least I don't think so. There was a base out there, but it's some weird military place. I'm not sure whose military, though. I heard as much Russian as I did English, and none of the uniforms had any sort of insignia."

"Is it a mercenary training center?"

"No--something else. There were a couple of big hangars on the base. And there were some really funky looking airplanes in them."

Rodden's visit began to fall into some kind of context. "What do you mean funky looking airplanes?"

As Krycek began describing what he had seen, it was, strangely, Marita who stopped him, and began asking a dizzying array of technical questions about the craft in the hangar. After about five minutes of interrogation, she turned to the rest.

"What Alex saw are probably a form of hybrid alien aircraft. Not quite what you have seen previously, but close. The Soviets were only partial partners in the consortium. The Politburo and GRU sub-agencies that represented the USSR to our organization were always suspicious of the larger organization, which they regarded as being part of the decadent west. We always suspected they were running their own programs--experimenting with alien technology. They denied it, of course, but we had enough moles to know that some tests were underway. Now that the Russian army is in such disarray that they aren't being paid for months at a time, it's probably easy for the Americans to lure pilots into stealing airplanes and defecting to the West. The compound Alex saw is probably a debriefing center."

Her explanation was a little too ready, a little too smooth, but it jibed with Rodden's visit, and explained about 80% of the situation, he thought.

"So, what about the readings that moved from Oregon to Alaska, could those have been a test flight of one of those aircraft?"

"Possible. But unlikely. The hybrid craft always had a noticeably different energy signature than the real ones."

That raised some interesting questions.

"So what do we think is in Alaska?" He felt a strange anticipation.

Scully resumed her spokesperson role. "Some alien craft. Whether or not it's the same one that took Mulder isn't clear, but I think we should go check it out." He ached at the undercurrent of hope he heard in her voice. Don't count on this, Scully. You know how often we have been led down the wrong path.

"Yeah, despite the warning I got today, I think you're right. but I think you're going to run into some resistance up there." He was already assuming that she would be traveling.

He briefly recapped his encounter with Colonel Rodden. "Ms. Covarrubias, Krycek, is there, was there a Consortium operation in Alaska?" Strange to be discussing such things so dispassionately.

Marita replied. "No, I don't think so. There were very few operations in North America outside of the Southwest."

"Then why do we think this ship went to Alaska?"

Marita's gaze flicked briefly toward Scully before returning to coolly meet his eyes. "Maybe because some things grow better in the cold."

 

The argument about who would go to Alaska to investigate the energy readings had raged for almost two hours. Scully had been ready to pack her bags and get on the next plane heading anywhere north or west. She did not seem to feel that she needed a teammate.

Skinner, knowing her condition, knowing what it was like to travel under that sort of emotional duress, didn't want to send her alone. But he couldn't go with her.

The phone call that had tied up his cel phone on the drive between the office and the warehouse had been from the FBI Director's secretary. Freeh had called an extremely rare meeting of all Assistant Directors for three days from now, and his secretary had made it clear there were no excuses for not attending the meeting. Even your own death. 

That left Krycek, Marita, and the Gunmen. The Gunmen, although also clearly reluctant to let Scully go to Alaska on her own, had made it plain that none of them could or would undertake a long journey like that. They were resolute in their stance that any sort of public travel would be hazardous to them. Despite Skinner's assurances that there were not dozens of federal agents waiting to snatch them from the streets, none of the Gunmen could be persuaded to go. Frohike very nearly gave in, but finally retreated, muttering, to his computer.

Marita had not indicated with even a twitch of her eyebrow that she was interested or willing to go to Alaska. She made some vague statement about pressing in-town business she needed to followup on, and then lapsed into an impenetrable silence. 

When it became apparent that Krycek was going to be Scully's traveling companion, they both nearly rebelled.

"With all due respect, sir," her attention was riveted on Skinner, as though he were the only one in the room, "I don't think I need backup. I'll go up and check out the situation, and if necessary, I'll get back up from the Juneau office." Her tone was at its most clipped.

"You might not have time." He understood her reluctance, but didn't trust her impatience. She had studied the fine art of impulsive rescue under a master.

"You can't think that one person," she glanced over at Krycek with barely veiled contempt, "will make enough of a difference if it's a really tough situation."

Krycek wasn't thrilled either, "Don't kid yourself, princess," his contempt wasn't veiled at all, "I'm not exactly dying for this assignment, either. But, Skinner's right. You shouldn't go alone, and if we run into resistance maybe one of us can stay alive long enough to call for some real help."

"Which we would get from precisely where, Krycek? It's not like anyone here can exactly call in the 3rd Infantry."

"You're the one who said you could get help from the Juneau office."

"It's a 10-person office, including the secretaries."

"Then why did you bring it up?"

"I don't know." She turned back to Skinner, exasperated, ready to leave, to move. "I can go alone. I'll attract less attention if I'm traveling on my own."

"No. Alex is going with you." He had the odd sensation of sending children out into an unpredictable world. "The uninhabited areas outside Fairbanks are too easy to get lost in. And there are a number of hazards--both man made and natural."

She glared at him, and he was reminded of all the times she had defied him. He wanted to find the words to tell her that he would give anything to go with her, but he couldn't. She shouldn't be traveling into the hinterlands by herself, so it would have to be Krycek. He hoped she wouldn't force him into issuing a direct order.

He softened his tone marginally. "Depending on what you find, and how long you're gone, I'll meet you guys up there. But, I can't leave town until after the Freeh meeting. All the ADs are on travel ban effective tonight. Go up there. Scope out the situation. We don't want to lose any time."

He could read her unhappy acceptance of the situation, but was greatly relieved to realize that she had accepted the arrangements.

"Ok, we'll leave as soon as possible. Frohike, when is the next flight leaving for Seattle that will connect to a Fairbanks flight?"

"There's the United flight out of Dulles at 6 a.m. Do you want me to book the tickets?"

"Yeah--we'll take that one. Krycek, meet me at the terminal no later than 5:15." She left without saying goodbye to anyone.

Skinner turned away from watching her walk out the door to find Alex watching him--anger mixing with a haunting need in his eyes.

"I don't work for you anymore, old man. What makes you think I'm going up to Alaska to let that red haired bitch order me around?"

"You're going, boy," the dark familiar anger, but now underlaid with something else, "because you're in this for revenge, for whatever personal gain you can get out of this, and the best place to do that is on the front lines and you know it." He wondered why they were having to play out this particular drama.

The silent struggle of wills had a preordained conclusion. Krycek gave a curt nod. "I'm sure you'll be getting updates from the road."


	6. Chapter 6

It seemed to Krycek that he would have been very happy to live his entire life without being given definitive proof that Dante was right. At the very lowest and most desperate reaches of Hell--the level, he remembered through some odd quirk of memory, that was reserved for traitors--things were not hot, but a frozen lake of ice. Cold--surely there was a more vivid word he could find--icy, frozen, frigid; nothing seemed quite adequate to describe it. He was so tired of the cold, the bone-numbing chill, the arctic air.

And they hadn't even reached Alaska yet.

He suppressed another sigh and refrained from looking over at Scully. The last time he'd done that, he'd made the mistake of making eye contact. He was surprised to discover that he seemed to be unable to build up any sort of insulation against her implacable disdain. This was going to be one very long fucking trip.

For the first hour or so, he had found it amusing. Her studious aloofness was so melodramatic. He felt like a junior high school boy who'd been found kissing another girl during lunch time, and was being given the cold shoulder by his steady. He almost said "I get it--you're ignoring me." But provoking her that directly seemed like a bad idea. Beneath her frosty surface he could sense a deep, mature anger and he could only pray to a god he barely remembered that he would be several continents away when she remembered exactly all the reasons she might want to see him dead.

He was really going to have start traveling with women he hadn't either left for dead, or whose kidnapping he'd helped arrange.

The temptation to show up with just moments to spare for their flight from DC to Seattle had been nearly overwhelming. Her little "meet me no later than 5:15" command had rankled him about six different ways, and the impulse toward mindless rebellion was ingrained. He'd been there on time, though, figuring that maybe if he showed in small ways that he could be a team player it might make the trip a little less unpleasant.

So far it hadn't seemed to help.

Thank god the flight was half-empty. They'd been assigned seats next to each other--he was planning to kill Frohike in a slow, unpleasant way when they got back, although he thought he might have to compete with Scully for the privilege. However, the entire row next to them had been empty, so immediately after takeoff, he'd moved over to it and left Scully in sole possession of the three seats on the right side of the plane.

After waving away the predictably disgusting airline breakfast--a significant component of his long-term survival strategy was to, at all costs, avoid eating airplane food--he'd settled in to try to sleep away as much of the flight as he could.

He'd watched in envy as Scully had tucked up her legs and been able to lay her small frame across the row of seats and apparently drift off to sleep. He shifted around, the minuscule bit of fluff the airline called a pillow was only minor cushioning against the unyielding arm of the seat digging into his back. At least he could stretch out his legs.

He found himself watching Scully, again.

Throughout his long association with the strange game they were all caught up in, he had on a number of occasions drawn the assignment of Mulder and Scully watcher. There were days when he thought he knew more about them than they knew about themselves. But then he would catch them watching each other, or watch them exchange one of their glances that seemed to rewrite the secrets of the known universe in less than 2.3 seconds, and he'd realize that he would, in fact, probably never know another human being the way those two knew each other.

It was his considered opinion that that was a good thing. He was very sure he never wanted anyone looking straight through his soul the way she saw Mulder.

But there were those long periods of surveilling the two of them, and nothing much to occupy his mind except on those rare occasions when one or the other of them got too close to the truth, or to the wrong lie. And so he would watch them. Not the agents, but the people, and play the game of trying to figure out what made them tick.

Mulder was easy, actually. All brain and hurt feelings. All he wanted was someone to believe him, and a fairy godmother to point him toward the aliens' ball. It made him easy to manipulate, and made even his unpredictability predictable in a way.

Scully, though, had never made as much sense to Krycek. First of all, he continued to be surprised at how little she played Mulder. As well as she knew him, she had to be aware of how readily she could have had the boy following her around on a leash, and yet she almost never made any attempt to sway Mulder with anything other than the force of her own beliefs and reasoning. It seemed like such a waste of time. All she would have had to do was occasionally bat her eyelashes and say, "Oh Mulder, of course I believe you," and she could have had anything she wanted. And Krycek was reasonably certain he knew at least one thing she wanted.

She was such a contradiction. The quintessential rationalist, she could dissect situations with a calculating, dispassionate eye that Krycek found himself envying. Her brain, he thought, must be like a set of finely honed scalpels that sliced information into tiny categorizeable bits of data. She had an astonishing ability to sort through all the madness that she encountered and find the information that would best support a rational, scientific explanation. She was right, most of the time.

And yet, occasionally, she would go haring off on a wild chase of her own. He had seen her surrender to impulse, and each time, he was caught off guard, breathless at her sudden audacity and daring.

He thought Mulder probably had no idea exactly how dangerous she could be.

He'd been contemplating exactly what was going on between Mulder and Scully when she'd suddenly sat up and caught him staring at her. She held his gaze, her fury burning away the last of her sleepiness, until he'd been forced to drop his eyes. Damn. He hated feeling guilty for no reason--he didn't even waste time feeling guilty for all the reasons he did have. He was contemplating the weaving pattern of his jeans when he heard a sudden muffled sound from her and then she'd abruptly dashed up the aisle to the toilets.

She must have made the mistake of eating the airplane breakfast.

He'd turned his gaze out the window and waited for the plane to land.

Mercifully the layover before they picked up their connecting flight to Fairbanks was short. They were the only two people in the back part of the plane, so he was surprised when Scully settled into the aisle seat of the set of three he was sitting in.

The empty seat between them didn't seem like nearly enough buffer space. But all she did was reach in her backpack and pull out a set of maps. She glanced around to make sure they were still alone.

"Okay--here's the Gunmen's best guess of the location of the signal. It's pretty much due north, but also a bit west of Fairbanks. There are roads, of a sort, leading to the area. The infrareds and other images the guys have picked up suggest an installation about twice the size of the one you say you saw in Oregon."

He let the jab pass without comment. Definitely a long fucking trip. Maybe if he didn't wind up killing her it would work off some of the bad karma he'd accumulated over the years.

They studied the maps together and reviewed the logistics arrangements of where they would pick up their vehicle and camping gear. As they began discussing strategy, he was surprised to find her iciness giving way to a cool, professional civility. She didn't take bullshit well, but if she thought you made a good point, she didn't fight you on it. She was also not inclined to argue purely for the sake of arguing. It was a pleasant change.

By the time they reached Fairbanks, they'd already been traveling for 12 hours, and still had two hundred miles of back country roads to drive. The latitude of their position meant that daylight extended long past 10 p.m., but it was after dark by the time they reached the area they'd tentatively identified as the first stopping point.

The maps supplied by the guys had been accurate to an almost frightening degree. Too bad the US military couldn't get stuff this up-to-date; might have spared themselves some grief with Chinese embassies.

Given Krycek's experience with the foot patrols in Oregon, they weren't sure how close to the base they would be able to approach unobserved. Fortunately, like the other base, this installation abutted a national park that had lots of hiking trails. The plan was to check in at the campground, set up camp like any vacationers, and then begin reconnaissance work with the little bit of night they would have.

They picked out a spot that seemed the most removed from other campers and began the tedious process of hauling all the gear out of their vehicle and setting up at least a minimal camping site.

There was only one tent.

Krycek, who hadn't really been paying attention when they'd picked up all their supplies, couldn't decide how to react. Scully seemed to have no reaction whatsoever; simply unloading it and calmly beginning to roll it out.

"Can you hand me that hammer, please?" She was setting one of the stakes.

"Where's the other tent?"

"What other tent?"

"The one for the other of us." He couldn't identify the source of the slight panic he felt rising in him.

She paused, her hand still reaching out for the requested hammer and looked up at him, her face barely visible in the moonlight and the minimal lamp light. "There's only one tent, Krycek. Now could you please give me the hammer?" He swore he could hear amusement in her dry tone.

Fuck. She'd noticed the panic.

"Why do I have to sleep outside? It gets fucking cold up here, even in the summer." Great. Now he was whining. Amazing how extreme fatigue and traveling could render even a stone killer into a four-year old.

She stood up and looked him in the eyes for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then she brushed by him and picked up the hammer. As she was walking back, she tossed over her shoulder. "In as much as we'll get to do any sleeping here, I rather presumed we'd be sleeping in shifts. Ergo, one tent. You want to unload the rest of the gear?" He didn't quite trust the way she was shifting the hammer in her hand.

He helped her finish setting up their site without further comment.

They had about a half-mile hike to the hill the maps indicated would give them the best view of the base. He was amazed at her steady, quiet pace through the forest. He was so tired he could hardly put one foot in front of the other, but she simply flowed through night. He'd been through the FBI Academy and knew that there was no training she'd received there to account for her stealthy competence. Another piece of the puzzle, and he had no idea what it meant.

They passed a number of "Restricted Area. Do Not Enter. Trespassers Will Be Arrested and Prosecuted" signs, and began moving more slowly--alert for possible alarm systems or patrols. Finally crawling the last few yards to the crest of the hill, which was covered with scattered clumps of trees and a clearing of tall grass that gave them a clear view of the base. They moved out into the grass and lay there withbinoculars, scanning what was, as promised, a large military-type base. He couldn't shake the feeling that it had been just a little too easy to get there.

The compound was not particularly well camouflaged. Some rudimentary foliage and tenting, but it was too big to hide successfully. It was at least twice the size of the one he'd seen in Oregon, and had large groups of buildings; as well as an open space that from this distance might be runways or training areas. There were jeeps sweeping back and forth, and groups of men moving in formation in various areas. They couldn't see how far back the compound stretched.

Like the base he'd seen in Oregon, this one seemed to be military, but it was not quite clear whose forces. The soldiers they could see all wore generic battle fatigues, and none of the jeeps or other vehicles had any identifiable markings. They were too far away to hear anything, so couldn't determine if Russian was being spoken.

For the middle of the night, there was an usual degree of activity. The men seemed to be preparing for something, but it wasn't possible to determine what. Scully got out a notepad and began taking methodical notes.

"Five large buildings, three of which appear to be hangars, on the west end of the compound. At least one jet-length runway apparent, and maybe two; not possible to determine at this distance. Krycek, how many men do you think are down there?"

"We've seen at least eight units of ten to fifteen each. It's the middle of the night, so we're probably seeing half of the force at most. But, we also don't know what's on the far side of the compound."

She scribbled a few more lines, and then went back to watching the activity through her binoculars.

Laying in the grass, scanning the base through his lenses, he could feel the fatigue of the journey washing over him. He felt the tug of sleepiness pulling him down further and further away from the here and now. A few minutes of rest, just a few.

A sudden wave of sound from their left ripped him from the fog that was creeping through his brain. They both sat up quickly, as an aircraft came tearing out of the sky.

At first it was nothing but a wash of noise. A jumble of sounds--grinding mechanical rhythms underlaid by a humming that he could barely hear, but that he felt rattling his bones. Then a pop! and lights blinked on just above them--bright searing whiteness that seemed to have a weight and intelligence. He felt it looking for them, hunting them out through the night.

Instinctively they both threw themselves back on the grass. He felt, irrationally, like a mouse cowering as the ominous swoop of owl wings overhead signaled impending death. A millisecond later, the runway on the base lit up, and the craft screamed in to land. It glided to a halt at the far end of the runway, and then turned and taxied back toward the hangar closest to them.

On the ground, the craft resolved itself into a more recognizable form. It looked very much like the American F-14 jet fighter, but it was much bigger, there were strange attachments on the undercarriage, and the engine noise was not consistent with an F-14.

As it approached the hangar, the doors slid open with a clang that could be heard clear across the field. The craft taxied in, the doors closed and the night resumed its near-silence.

Oddly, the hangar was empty.

Krycek looked over at Scully, to find her watching him, one eyebrow raised in a familiar gesture of surprise. He shrugged. "It looks a little like some of the planes I saw in Oregon, and no, I don't know why the hangar was empty."

An unreadable emotion crossed her face. "Okay." She turned back to the base. Then picked up her binoculars and scanned the middle section of the runway again. "Hey--take a look down there. The activity's actually picked up. I think they're expecting something else tonight." 

He watched the figures in uniform running back and forth. Some groups were rolling out some kind of cording along the edge of one of the runways, and other groups seemed to be setting up sandbag bunkers with large guns.

"I don't know what they're expecting, but I sure as hell don't think it's going to be friendly."

She sighed, and for the first time he could hear her own fatigue. "Damn. I guess we'll be here for a while."

He was still feeling the lingering effects of the adrenaline rush from the plane's sudden appearance. Almost off-handly he said, "Look, why don't you rest for a bit. I'll wake you up if anything happens."

He was surprised at how readily she accepted his offer. She simply nodded, and they moved back to the largest stand of trees. If he sat on the roots of the one at the edge, he could still see the base clearly. She moved a few paces into the cover and he could hear her shaking out the sleeping bag she'd brought with her.

The night rapidly became chilly and then cold.

So much of his life had been spent waiting, and watching. He felt his body sliding into the strange fugue-like state that he'd learned to adopt on these long shifts. He had developed small routines and habits to keep himself in that middle-ground state of wakefulness, but not full consciousness. He didn't even realize that he'd picked up a small twig and was methodically snapping into millions of tiny splinters until Scully moved sharply behind him. The small percussions of the snaps were the undercurrent to his drifting thoughts.

"Krycek." He jerked upward toward fuller consciousness.

"What?"

"Could you cut it out?" He could tell she was making an effort to be civil. It took him a moment to figure out what she was talking about. He looked down at his hand, almost surprised to see the remains of the twig.

"Oh. Yeah." He resumed staring off toward the encampment. They, too, seemed to have settled in for the night, after the last hour or so of preparations. Nothing stirred on the runways, or in the hangars, which seemed to be dark.

The silence around them was nearly complete. There were small animal sounds in the distance, and the occasional gust of wind would send a dry rustling through the still, but it felt eerily like the entire area around the installation had been..sanitized. He suppressed a small shiver.

Her sudden movement was shockingly loud. He felt her rising behind him, and then heard her as she moved away from the sleeping bag, and sat against a tree about four feet from him. He could just catch a glimpse of her profile out of the corner of his eye. He kept looking stubbornly straight ahead.

"I thought you were going to get some sleep." His voice, he was pleased to hear, was entirely level.

"I wanted to...just couldn't seem to get to sleep." Her voice betrayed her weariness.

"What's the matter? Afraid I'd murder after you drifted off?" He'd meant it to be a sarcastic jibe, but thought that some other tone had crept in.

"No." Her voice soft, almost a whisper. A pause that lingered and deepened. "Why did you come up here?"

For a startled instant, he wasn't sure if she was talking to him or to herself. Even as he answered her, he thought it was a little of both.

"Skinner told me to." He figured she wouldn't miss the fine edge of irony in his voice. The truth was so much more complex--something deep and convoluted-- he could barely articulate it to himself, and he damned well didn't owe her any piece of his soul. Skinner had a great deal to do with it, of course, but it was far beyond any simple explanation.

In his peripheral vision he could see the small shake of her head. "And of course, being the good little soldier that you are, you obeyed?"

Again he was aware of a conversation taking place on at least two levels.

"Yeah, something like that." And then before he could stop himself, "Why are you here?"

He didn't expect her to answer. "I had to do something. Move. Get out here and look for him." Her whisper didn't hide the undertone of naked longing.

Surprising to hear his own restlessness voiced by Scully. Strange to feel this sympathy for her. "I know what you mean."

The silence that followed lasted so long that he thought maybe she had fallen asleep where she sat.

"What made you do it?" She kept surprising him. He was beginning to wonder if it was all women who confused him, or if he just kept meeting the wrong ones. He wasn't sure exactly what she was asking him, but knew it had to relate to all his numerous treacheries and betrayals.

He could treat it as a rhetorical question, just let it die, or deflect it with the nonchalant sarcasm he wore like a second skin. But somehow the long journey, the clear sense of being thousands of miles from anywhere, and the pre-dawn darkness gave him a strange sense of immunity. For just this moment he felt insulated against all that lay behind them.

"Power. Survival." Not the words he expected to hear himself say. The truth cut the night into razor sharp shards.

He could hear her sudden indrawn breath. She hadn't expected him to answer. He waited with a strange sense of anticipation to see how she would respond.

"Was it worth it?"

"Is anything ever worth it?" But compelled by an honesty he still didn't understand. "I'm still here, more or less."

He felt her move again, could feel her gaze prickling along his consciousness - she turned to look at him for the first time that night.

Almost no light in the clearing, but he could see her eyes so clearly.

Watched him for a long, considering minute. "So am I."

He was trying to decipher the look in her eyes, when the night exploded.


	7. Chapter 7

This is all Mulder's fault. The thought formed with startling clarity as she gazed back at Krycek. Afterwards, Scully would ask herself what she had meant by the thought. At the time it was so very clear.

All his fault. Then the sky ripped open.

The sound reached them first. A rolling, shuddering wave of noise that washed over them, rocking them back, tumbling them loose and shaking to the ground. It was indescribable--the noise, the sensation, the experience. A jumble of tones and pitch and rhythm and random discord, it vibrated at frequencies that she thought she should be able to see. Surely this violent assault of sound was more than mere audible frequencies. The sound waves resonating in this unbelievable cacophony must also be vibrating along the visible spectrum.

Then the world went utterly silent, and the lights arrived.

Oh my god. Oh god. Oh my god. It was them. It was back. And she could think of nothing but she needed to run. She had to get out of there before They arrived again and burned down the world.

One tiny detached part of her brain noted that her respiration and heart rates were ratcheted up well past any mere panic response. Her heart hammered hummingbird-frantic, trapped by the too solid reality of her chest. She was damn close to hyperventilating, and could feel a sort of hysterical paralysis setting in. _I need to move, I need to move, come on--fucking move!_ But her body wouldn't respond, and she could only crouch there in the grass and watch the nightmarish trapezoidal craft glide with silent menace overhead.

Her vision kaleidoscoped and blurred, overlapping the here and now with the half-remembered memories of the dam. The lights sweeping over her tossed her back and forth in time. Standing in the cold night air on that bridge, hand on Cassandra's shoulder. The grass under her hands and knees on the hill was strangely warm. There were men with flames walking toward them, through the crowd. The ship's lights seemed to be seeking her out of the darkness. _Cassandra! Where are you going? How?_ The earth shook silently in the darkness. The men had no faces. She couldn't move. She couldn't move. They had reached her, and the first flame flicked her face, almost gently, a deadly caress. The next touched her arm. It rocked her, shook her.

"Scully! SCULLY!"

She was suddenly back in her body, and aware of Krycek crouching next to her, shaking her, shouting at her. "Scully?! Come on, damnit. Come on--we have to fucking move."

He yanked at her impatiently, and then she was able to stand, and let him help her stumble back to the shelter of the trees.

She had the distinct impression that it didn't matter where they stood. They--the ship itself--already knew everything it needed to about them. She was small. They were so small.

Krycek's voice in her ear, urgent, rasping whisper. "What the fuck is that thing? I saw something like it in Oregon, I think. What is it? What the fuck happened to you?"

Understanding that he wasn't really expecting her to answer, she let his voice wash over her, just background noise to the images, memories and emotions that tumbled through her mind. She stood next to him, partially hidden behind a tree, shaking with cold and fright and a sensation that had no name, only a faint association in her memory with light and a feeling of being away.

Her legs buckled, and she slid to the ground, a crumpled heap of quivering muscle and scattered thought. Without conscious volition she found her hand rubbing the back of her neck; the skin under her fingers was icy cold and seemed to have a faint pulse.

She tried to collect her thoughts, aware that the scene in front of her was changing, but sights and sounds and sensations seemed to be reaching her through some muting filter. Her awareness was captive to some other force, a force that she thought somehow emanated from the aircraft.

The ship had moved away from them and now hovered over the runway of the base, which had sprung to life sometime during the last ten minutes. The lights of the ship dimmed to a luminescence comparable to a regular jet's landing lights, and with an audible 'snick' they could suddenly hear what sounded like a plane's engines. Underneath that sound, the general noises of the night began reasserting themselves.

The ship hovered for an indeterminate period of time, the grinding engine noise offset by a faint counterpoint of humming in a minor key. And then gently, almost like a snowflake drifting to the earth, the craft alighted on the runway, and all the lights clicked off.

Instantly the soldiers on the base sprang into action. A dozen jeeps converged to ring the ship, and at least six squadrons of heavily armed men took positions around the craft.

Krycek dropped as low to the ground as he could and began an awkward crawl-hitch through the grass back toward the edge of the clearing so he could see the base more clearly. She watched him go with a half-numbed sense of confusion. Don't go back toward that thing, Krycek. What the fuck do you hope to accomplish? She shook her head sharply, and felt focus sliding back into place. They had a mission to accomplish here. This was no time to have the vapors.

And yet as she crawled forward to meet him, she could feel a tug of reluctance. This was wrong. They should be getting away from that thing, not moving toward it.

A door swung down from beneath the craft and a beam of light reflected onto the tarmac, illuminating a set of stairs leading up to the interior of the ship. For one brief bemused moment, Scully wondered if she would start hearing the greeting music from 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.' Just as the thought crossed her mind, a dark figure began to make its way to earth.

She shivered, a chill wracking her bones. God, she wanted to be anywhere but here.

Krycek's voice in her ear nearly stopped her heart. "Animal, vegetable or mineral?" She hated him in that second. Hated him for his nonchalance, the fact that this spaceship seemed to have no impact on him whatsoever, hated him for seeing her in this moment of vulnerability.

Apparently he wasn't expecting an answer; when she glanced over at him, his attention was riveted on the action unfolding below. Several more figures had emerged from the craft. They seemed generally human-like, dressed in dark clothing. Shrouded as they were, though, by the shadow cast by the hulking aircraft, it was impossible to see precisely who or what these figures might be.

The ring of soldiers with their drawn weapons continued to hold their positions--surrounding the men from the ship. The tension in each group was apparent even from the distance of their observation. Finally a jeep appeared at the far end of the runway, traveling fast and directly toward the assembled scenario.

The figures from the ship drew themselves into a tight group, perhaps in fright, or in preparation for some kind of defense. The jeep screeched to a stop just outside the perimeter of the armed men, and another uniformed man jumped lightly out of it. His dark skin seemed nearly ebony black in the harsh lights on the tarmac, and his authority was clear in the way he moved, each step sure and commanding. Hints of silver gleamed at his shoulders. The soldiers from the base seemed to draw themselves slightly to attention, although each maintained his post and position.

The commander strode forward until he was just a few feet from the group of visitors. He appeared to be saying something; his gestures seemed overly broad, as though he were communicating with people who didn't quite speak whatever language he was attempting.

One of the visitors stepped toward the commander and instantly the soldiers closest to the commander edged forward, weapons prominently on display. The commander motioned them back impatiently, and a dialogue commenced.

A few seconds passed and then the visiting leader began gesturing back toward the ship. The base commander nodded and several of the visitors disappeared into the ship and returned carrying four large boxes. The crates were brought to the commander and one was opened. The visitor lifted out something that looked like a large, silver machine gun, only the magazine was oddly shaped, and it seemed lighter than the guns Scully remembered from weapons training at Quantico.

"Fuck me," Krycek's voice was excited, but still quiet. "I think those are the hybrid weapons those fucking aliens kept promising us. That looks like the prototype I saw a couple of years ago. I gotta get a closer look." He reached into his jacket for the field binoculars he was carrying in an inner pocket.

It is a cliche to say that timing is everything, but it is. Small miscalculations, unanticipated delays, minor instances of bad luck adding on top of each other, and out of nowhere you have a disaster.

Scully's attention had been pulled to the ship, where another group of the visitors were escorting what appeared to be prisoners off the ship. They were being led down the steps, pushed and pulled along, and some of the prisoners seemed to be smaller, almost child-sized. Without thinking, Scully reached over and placed her hand on Krycek's arm, preventing him, momentarily from completing the motion to reach for the binoculars.

"Krycek," her voice hissing through the darkness felt unnaturally loud. "What..Who are they? What's happening. Do you think..." She had to bite off the thought before she could voice it. Could it be him? Could one of those figures be Mulder? Her stomach knotted with the force of her longing. She wanted to move forward--hurl herself down the hill into the midst of the group, to look into the faces of each of those men until she found the face she was looking for.

He was down there. He could be down there. He could be down there.

As they watched, the prisoners were herded into a small group encircled by the visitors, within the larger group of the soldiers with drawn weapons. Concentric circles of players in the surreal geometry of the unfolding scene. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something. Then the military commander picked up one of the weapons from the open crate.

Beside, Krycek moved restively, and she became aware that she had his arm clenched in her hand. She released him, and met his eyes for a moment.

"I'll take a look." An almost languid drawl. She thought she should want to look herself, confirm for herself the identity of the figures below, and yet she found she couldn't bring herself to reach for her own binoculars. She wanted to know, but was afraid of the answer. Then there was no further time for introspection.

It happened with a fluidity of timing that couldn't have been planned or choreographed. She could have plotted it with a series of mathematical equations, so precise were the sequence of events.

Krycek brought the field glasses up to his eyes, just as a cloud that had been obscuring the moon moved away.

The commander hefted the gun experimentally and moved it in an arc around his body. As he turned toward the back of the base so that he faced the hill on which Scully and Krycek lay, the rays of the moon glinted off the lenses in Krycek's hand.

A shout that carried over the open air, and then all the figures on the tarmac were facing the hill and pointing toward them.

Almost casually, Krycek put down the field glasses and looked at Scully. "I think we've been discovered."

And they were both on their feet, running back to the tree line and the cover of the forest.

There was the crack of weapons fire from the base, and she looked back over her shoulder for a second to see several jeeps and humvees crashing through the fence and squadrons of men running behind. They had a couple hundred yards of open field to cover, but they seemed to be moving ungodly fast.

Instinctively, Krycek and Scully began heading toward the camp. She wasn't sure exactly what the plan was. It was only clear that they needed to get the hell out of there, now.

Part of her, though, was still back on the base. Who were those figures who'd been brought out at the end? It seemed that they were some kind of prisoners or captives. Were they being returned? Turned over to the soldiers? If so, why? She wanted to turn back, even as she knew she couldn't. She felt a tether inside her connecting her to some place else, to somebody else, stretching longer and thinner. It might have been him down there, or maybe only her wish to see him.

They ran through the woods, stumbling over the roots of trees, feet sliding across the loose rocks and leaves along the pathways. With their head start, they should have made it back to the campsite well ahead of their pursuers, but they ran and they ran and it seemed only that they were further in the woods, and that the shouts of the soldiers and the rattle of weapons grew nearer.

The moon, previously their enemy, was their only help now. Just enough light filtered through the trees to let them see well enough to avoid the most dangerous obstacles. But it was still so dark, and they were tired and disoriented. There was the sound of running all around them. Impossible to know who or what followed them in the dark. So on they ran, trusting only that whatever was in front of them would be less dangerous than what they knew followed them from behind.

A curve in the path, and Krycek gave a grunt of surprise as his feet slipped to the left and his body lurched right. A gasp, and a tangle and movement and suddenly she was pulled under him, his heavy body pinning her to the ground.

She'd managed to twist as she felt him crashing into her, so they landed face to face--a parody of intimacy. Under her back, she could feel the rocks and twigs of the forest floor digging into her muscles, and all along her front was Krycek. She could feel his breath feathering across her skin, smell the dark musk of his male sweat; she was aware of the hard warmth of his body. For a shocked instant, their eyes locked, and some trick of the moonlight turned his eyes hazel-silver. She was caught in his gaze, drawn in by a clarity and sorrow in his eyes that she'd never seen before. For just that moment she saw him. Not Krycek, but the man behind the name.

She heard his sudden indrawn gasp, and he blinked.

Then he was rolling off her, helping her to her feet, and grabbing her hand to pull her along with him, running once more.

They had only gone a few steps this time when she heard her name. "Agent Scully!" She turned to Krycek wondering what he wanted, only to hear his name, whispered in the same urgent, unfamiliar tone. "Mr. Krycek!"

They skidded to a halt, instinctively coming to a stop, back to back, each reaching for weapons, searching the dark for the source of this unexpected call.

A familiar-looking man stepped out from Scully's left, he was carrying a flashlight, which was turned off, and there was a gun at his waist. Scully leveled her weapon at him--center mass.

"Stop right there." Her voice, although breathy from running, was level, she was pleased to note.

"You've got to come with me. It's not safe for you out here." Her mind was frantically trying to catalog where she knew him from. As he moved one step closer, his features resolved into an impossible form.

"Kurt? What are you doing out here? But...But...Mulder told me you were dead."

The man in front of her sighed. "I'm not Kurt. I'm Kevin. It's a long story. But, you really do need to come with me. It's not safe out here and we don't have much time."

Behind her, Krycek hissed, "What's going on?" From the rigidity of his back, she knew that he maintained a defensive posture, searching the other side of their space for danger.

"We seem to have an ally." She heard the tone of doubt in her voice, the evidence of her indecision. She was caught between a strange, instinctual trust of this red-haired man in front of her, and her general suspicion these days of all offers of help.

Kevin stepped toward her again, but she didn't lower her gun. "We've got to get out of here, Agent Scully. They're getting close and we're a bit off course."

"Whose course?" She was beginning to wonder if someone had forgotten to send her the memo with this week's secret code.

"Look, I promise to explain everything later, but we have to go now. We've been out here looking for you for the past five hours, it's just dumb luck that I found you. Please, just follow me." He turned and began walking out of the clearing.

She stood her ground. "Why should I?"

He paused and look back over his shoulder. "Because you want to find Mulder, and we can help you do that."

She couldn't prevent the strange leap of hope his name evoked in her. "Then shouldn't we be going back toward the base?" She gestured in the general direction she thought the base lay.

"No, because he's not there. Look. I really do promise to explain everything, but later, when we're safe. Now, follow me." The tone of command was unmistakable, and unexpected. 

They followed.

Kevin moved through the dark with skill of a practiced woodsman. Beside her, Krycek muttered. "Are you sure we should be following this guy? Do you know who he is?"

"No and no....well, no and maybe. I'm not sure we should be following him, and I sort of know who he is." Surprised to find herself being so open with Krycek. Remembering for a split second what it was like to have a partner.

He just looked at her and sort of shrugged. Then, with an odd reluctance, as though he, too, were unused to sharing information he said, "Okay. I don't know how many choices we have right now."

Kevin led them down a hillside, and then up another. They were on a rough hiking trail. Almost immediately the sounds of pursuit dimmed.

They walked for what felt like an endless period of time, but was probably no more than 20 or 30 minutes.

What little Scully could see of the sky seemed to be a dark grey rather than pitch black. They must be approaching dawn. She decided she wouldn't try to calculate how long it had been since she'd last slept.

Kevin stopped abruptly. "Shit!" He was looking around frantically, and Scully and Krycek immediately reached for their guns. Kevin turned back to them. "Put those away and climb that tree." He pointed to a large fir behind them.

Krycek was definitely not amused. "What? Are you crazy?" She was inclined to agree with the sentiment.

"No. It's our only chance. Now move!" Kevin motioned urgently up the tree trunk.

They could hear a faint crunching sound ahead of them--heavy footsteps. She wondered if they were escaping from a bear, or something else. What the hell. She began to climb.

She could hear Krycek quietly muttering expletives in what sounded like four or five languages, but he, too, climbed up behind her. His progress up the tree was slow and awkward, but she was only mildly surprised that he did manage. He seemed to be pulling himself up with one-armed pullups from branch to branch, and then swinging the artificial arm up to the next branch as a sort of counterweight and lever. Kevin climbed up behind him, watching warily.

They had barely found secure perches on the limbs of the tree when the group marched into the clearing below them. It was one of her worst nightmares walking abroad in the world. Faceless men, carrying open flames. The blurred, blanked faces atop eerily similar bodies that had just enough variation to show they were, in fact, individuals. And the flames, the flames. She wanted to scream, to run, to jump to the ground and attack them with her bare hands for the carnage she had witnessed them inflicting on innocent people.

She had just enough consciousness left to cling tightly to the tree and try to control her harsh ragged breathing. She felt Kevin place a hand on her shoulder, as though to help ground her, to remind her of their precarious position.

The men with the flames passed through the clearing almost without pausing. They were obviously searching for something, for someone, but they only swept their heads from side-to-side.

Kevin waited a full ten minutes after the group had left before motioning for descent. He shook his head, an unexpectedly wry grin appearing. "I'm always amazed at how well that works. They don't have trees, so they always forget to look up."

Back on the ground, Scully felt the fatigue and fear of the last day catch up with her. As they began walking again, she asked, "How much further back to our camp, Kevin?" She thought she'd give her eye teeth for a bath and about 20 hours of sleep.

"You can't go back to the camp. They'll be there waiting for you. Come with me--I'll take you to our base. You'll be safe there for a day or two and that will give us the time we need to make the travel arrangements."

She figured one of them had to ask the question, and at least if she asked it she could have the momentary illusion of control. "What travel arrangements? You mean back to DC?"

"Of course not, Agent Scully. What would the point be of that? The arrangements to get you to Tunisia." Kevin gestured for silence just as she was opening her mouth to protest.

They had reached the edge of small clearing. Kevin crouched near a large stump and placed his hand on top of it. There was a quiet click, followed by a hum, and Scully thought she saw a faint beam of light tracing the edges of the man's hand, but decided she had definitely lost it.

Then the panel at the base of the tree slid back. It had been a hand-scanner, in a tree stump. What was this? Some kind of strange children's story? She was beyond disbelief, though. So when Kevin motioned them forward, they obediently went, and followed the clone down the rabbit hole.


	8. Chapter 8

_The Alexandria Warehouse_

Somewhere around 2 o'clock in the morning, in the middle of a furious argument about the interpretation of the data from the bee attacks, it occurred to Skinner that Marita was the kind of woman who would wear garters simply so she could keep a stiletto strapped to her thigh.

He flushed and turned away, but the image lingered--the blue-grey hardness of steel pressed against warm, creamy skin. He found himself in a corner of the warehouse, staring at a blank, rusting wall, hands on his hips, a slight catch in his breath. What the hell was that all about? Damn, he was tired. So fucking tired. He was starting to lose it. Maybe he'd already lost it altogether.

Behind him, the others continued their argument. Marita and Byers seemed to be the main combatants.

"With all due respect, Ms. Covarrubias, I'm not sure you're interpreting the data correctly. Yes, this is a small sample we're working from, and we don't have any sort of comparison data. But I don't think you can ignore the consistent reports from four different doctors, and now that we have this MRI, I think we have to consider both psychological as well as physiological factors. I think we have to look at this MRI in comparison to those we've seen on other people who have been exposed to...." Byers' tone trailed off. He seemed caught between the force of his convictions and a fundamental distrust, or perhaps fear of Marita.

Marita gave what could only be described as an extremely lady-like snort of contempt. "I think you're overestimating what's here. We're talking about teenagers, not the most stable of subjects to start with, who were exposed to a traumatic event. Some psychological outcomes are to be expected. Early symptoms of schizophrenia are often first noticed in the late teenage years, anyway. These voices that these young men and women are reporting could simply be that, or some kind of group-perpetuated hysteria. It doesn't mean that they have developed the anomaly that you're implying. One MRI is scarcely conclusive evidence of fundamental physical outcomes. Besides, we don't even have a baseline to compare it to."

A chorus of protest from the Gunmen met her statement, voices overlapping in anger, and exhaustion, and simple reaction to the thinly veiled contempt in her tone. She was tired, too, he realized. Her veneer finally wearing away.

Skinner closed his eyes and exhaled, listening to the debate behind him. The words washed over him, occasional phrases suddenly and strangely clear, but the overall sense was lost. He could hear only their weariness, their frustration, their desperate sense of time running out. Nothing made sense anymore, and so the arguments became fiercer. Battles fought over small points for minor victories among themselves, because there was no hope anymore, it seemed, of winning the war against the enemy who stalked them.

He turned around and waded back into the skirmish. He resisted the urge to grab the nearest two people, regardless of who they were and whether or not they were arguing at this moment, and just bang their heads together. As satisfying as a brief bout of mindless violence might be, it seemed to him that someone needed to at least try to pretend to be in charge. What the hell, it might as well be him.

"Byers!" He felt a mild guilt at the man's instinctive flinch at being singled out. But Skinner wasn't quite ready to meet Marita's eyes. "What is it that you're trying to say about the data we got in the emails tonight? And what the hell were you talking about in terms of comparing it to other people?" He wondered how much of his own fatigue was reflected in his tone.

"I'm not completely sure." Byers still seemed hesitant to fully present his theory. "But, based on the emails we've received over the past couple of days, it's clear to me that some of the older teenagers who were stung in the bee attack in Italy are developing futher behavioral anomalies that may correspond to actual physiological changes. Tonight's email seems to confirm that. We received an MRI of one of the girls mentioned in the first set of reports from that attack, and her brain is showing activity in areas that you almost never see." He paused again, his eyes darting nervously over to Marita, and then back to Skinner.

"In fact, the only other MRI that I've seen that comes close to resembling this is the one we saw for Gibson. Although Gibson's had far more 'hot spots' than this. Still, it looks like maybe this girl has developed a more active...." he trailed off, seemingly unable to finish voicing his conclusions. Then he shook his head. "It's also got some resemblance to one of the scans I saw from Mulder when he was....in trouble."

Skinner sighed and tilted his head back in a futile attempt to loosen his aching neck and shoulders. He forced himself to look at Marita.

"Ms. Covarrubias? What is your interpretation of all this? We know that the Consortium has used bees as a ... delivery mechanism for various infectious agents before this. Do you think this is part of some old experiment? Something new?" They had had this conversation before, he realized, but everything about this game was circular, and maybe this time through the maze something would seem clearer.

Her eyes, as usual, gave nothing away, but he was surprised by a small twitch of her eyebrow. It was an ambiguous sign, but out of the ordinary, so he paid very careful attention to both her words and tone of voice.

"The Consortium, indeed, has been experimenting with bees as an infectious agent delivery vector for several years, Mr. Skinner." Her formality now perfectly back in place. "As you'll recall," her eyes just slightly harder, "experiments have included smallpox, and even an alien virus, such as Agent Scully was exposed to two years ago. However, none of the experiments that were underway at the time when most of the Consortium was destroyed a year-and-a-half ago were focused on creating the sorts of changes that these people," she flicked a contemptuous hand toward the Gunmen, "would attribute to the attacks in Florida and Italy."

"Florida?" He felt a mounting frustration, as though always four steps behind the unfolding events. "I thought we were talking about data from Italy."

Her response seemed a little too nonchalant. "We are, but there was a second batch of emails that indicate that some secondary effects from the attack in Florida are also starting to be investigated by local medical authorities."

The facts rolled around in his tired mind, loose, without context.

"Okay, Byers, what in particular has you so convinced about the importance of this data? Is it possible that someone is sending these to us just as a red herring? Does any of this relate to Mulder? Did you just say something about this looking like Mulder...?"

Byers' stubborn assurance had returned. "Since we're not entirely sure of the origins of the emails that have delivered us all these data, I can't guarantee that this isn't all just some fraud. But we have been able to do some validation of the long-term effects on the children in Italy by examining the news reports from that region. Popular media isn't the most reliable of sources, in some ways, but we have enough reports from various Italian news outlets that it seems as though the changes are definitely showing up in some small portion of the children from the Sicily incident. We're still trying to trace the effects in Florida."

Skinner finally recognized what he was missing. "Can someone please tell me what changes we're talking about?"

Strangely, it was Frohike who answered, his tone and demeanor graver than Skinner could ever recall. "Voices, Skinner. The kids are reporting hearing voices, and it seems like maybe they're able to read people's thoughts."

Jesus. He remembered the desperation in Mulder's eyes in that hospital room. The terror and rage when he'd attacked Skinner in the padded cell. The cold helplessness he'd felt at trying to help his agent navigate his way out of the darkness. He turned to Marita. "Could they be doing this? Could they have engineered some new alien virus?" He could hear the anger in his voice and didn't care.

She stood her ground, but for the first time in their acquaintance he thought he saw a flicker of fear. "I don't know. Nothing that was going on prior to the immolation of the elders would correspond to this. I don't think it's very likely."

They stood locked in each others' stare for an endless time as Skinner tried to penetrate her thoughts; to weigh not so much her honesty as her candor. The extent to which she was revealing not only what she knew as fact, but the speculations she must have.

She finally shifted minutely, and added, "But, there was always a faction that was engaged in some experiments about which we didn't know everything. We had most of the facts, we thought, but there were always rumors about other attempts at vaccines and ....creating hybrids."

Naturally the phone rang at just that moment, fracturing the silence. Langly flinched as though a gun had fired, and Frohike glanced around as though looking for a sudden intruder. Marita walked over and picked up the receiver. The call seemed to be for her. She turned away from the group, and they could only hear her quiet, monosyllabic responses to the caller.

It was apparent that the call would last for a bit. Skinner glanced over at the Gunmen, who had huddled and were speaking urgently in whispers. Byers kept pointing toward the bank of computers, but Langly shook his head and seemed to be arguing against whatever it was both Byers and Frohike wanted.

Skinner rolled his head again, the ache in his shoulders screaming of too little sleep and too much tension. He found himself walking out of the warehouse to the small gravel-paved yard behind it. He looked up at the stars, remembering how he'd found Scully out here just a few nights ago. He wondered how she and Krycek were doing in Alaska. It suddenly occurred to him that there had been no update from them in more than 12 hours. He hoped Scully hadn't killed Krycek. He gave a skeleton's grin at the gallows humor. Damn he was tired.

He wished he had the option of just walking away. Of ignoring the madness that had swallowed him like some kind of ancient sea monster. But those options had all been closed off a long time ago. He was trapped--within and without. Tiny monsters running along his bloodstream. The other monsters that lurked in the shadows that surrounded them all. There was nothing to do but fight--something he had trained for all his life--but he wanted a moment's respite.

One moment when he wasn't reminded at every breath of how alone he was. Alone in the dark.

Fuck. He was too goddamn tired. Tired of it all, tired of the strange motley crew he found himself leading, tired of himself. He needed to get away for a moment--regain his perspective. As it turned out, he wound up getting much further away than he ever would have imagined.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_A plane, somewhere over the Atlantic_

He was not, on balance, a Grateful Dead fan. But on the endless plane ride, Skinner couldn't get "What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been" out of his head. The chorus looped and hummed in his mind, irritating him, but ultimately striking him as a truth he had to accept.

This wasn't exactly how he'd planned to end his career. Resigning from the FBI in the middle of a search for one of his own agents appeared cowardly, he knew. And he had to admit to a certain ambivalence about that particular action. But it was the cleanest and most efficient decision he could make in these circumstances--they clearly had to go to Tunisia, and a simple leave of absence was out of the question. Nothing was simple, and there was no other way to leave quickly, with a minimum of fuss.

He knew he'd disappointed AD Jameson and a few other colleagues whom, over the years, he'd learned to regard as something closer than mere acquaintances. Not quite friends, but people whose respect mattered to him. It was a final small cut, one more dull pain to add to the others. After the events of the last few years, he'd given up any illusions that he would ultimately leave the agency a hero, but he hated like hell that it looked like he was slinking away a whipped dog, tail between his legs. No matter, he supposed. He knew the truth, and Scully knew, or would know.

And oddly, walking out of the building that final morning, after turning in his badge and his service weapon one last time, he'd felt suddenly free. His shoulders looser, his stride a little less fettered. 

He shifted in his seat and stared at the patchwork of cloud and ocean rolling away beneath him. Stale air circulating through the cabin, the insistent drone of the engines. A long, strange trip that still hadn't ended.

He found that his mind couldn't focus on any one thought for too long. It jumped and skittered. A loss of concentration was, he knew, one of the classic signs of fatigue. And stress.

He forced his mind back to the present--the reality of this flight, and the destination that awaited them.

Tunisia. He was flying to Tunisia. It should have surprised him more than it did. On the face of it, he and Marita were flying to Tunisia to follow what seemed the only solid clue he'd seen yet about Mulder's disappearance, and possibly the deeper conspiracy behind it all.

But it seemed to him that maybe they had been heading there for years. Like a kaleidoscope, the fragments of evidence tumbled through his mind. The men who'd assaulted him at Dr. Orgel's house had been carrying Tunisian diplomatic passports. Krycek had been held in a Tunisian penal colony just before his most recent return to the States. And the Gunmen had added the surprising information that Diana Fowley had made numerous, unexplained trips, on quasi-official FBI business to Tunisia during her tenure as a Legate Officer in Germany.

He had not been out of the country since his return to Vietnam. In some ways he was ambivalent about traveling abroad again. Sharon had always wanted to travel--to Europe, or South America--but he'd always managed to find an excuse to avoid the trips. Some conference, some training exercise, some case he couldn't possibly leave. Until finally she'd gone with her sister, or her friend Anne. And then finally she'd just gone. One more loss, one more sacrifice to a cause he could barely remember.

But, Tunisia was where they needed to go. Marita's contact, whose identity she refused to discuss, had called with information about a compound in Tunisia where, in the middle of the desert, there were large structures and fields that seemed to be supporting a bee husbandry project. The compound was heavily guarded, and Marita claimed that her contact had said that some "familiar" faces had been seen on the grounds. She did not elaborate, but it was clear that both her contact and the familiar faces were part of the old network of Consortium scientists and conspirators.

There was a followup email that showed satellite readings of the area that showed power and energy readings of the area consistent with the Oregon and Alaska readings. And finally, there had been an eyewitness account of seeing a group of American men in the compound, guarded by "strange looking military men." Two of the men described in the report could easily have been Mulder.

After the call had concluded and they'd received the email from her contact, Marita had been more animated than Skinner had ever seen her. She'd argued forcefully that they needed to depart for Tunisia right away. Skinner and Frohike had argued for caution, wanting to wait for an update from Scully and Krycek before making any decisions. Tunisia felt like one more wild goose chase, and it would be difficult, in particular for Skinner, to just leave the country on a second's notice.

But Marita had persisted, and finally she had been forced to admit that she'd long known of an ultra-secret Consortium project in Tunisia that had been infiltrated by "certain dissident forces from within the conspiracy," and it seemed to her that the news she'd just received indicated that maybe those dissidents had survived the holocaust that had destroyed most of the established powers within the organized Consortium.

Finally Skinner was swayed, out of combination of his own fatigue at trying to manage the two on-going investigations, at least one of which--the one he oversaw at the FBI--he knew had no chance of finding Mulder, and some strange intuitive belief in Marita's convictions.

Frohike remained adamantly opposed to the decision. He seemed to feel that Skinner was somehow betraying them by taking off to Africa with Scully's status unknown. But Skinner pointed out that this information clearly needed to be acted on quickly, given how rapidly situations involving the Consortium tended to change, and also that the three of them would be staying behind to coordinate any help that Scully and Krycek might need. Still, as he left the warehouse that night to start making travel arrangements, he could hear Frohike's angry mutters as he bent over his computer.

So, now Skinner flew over the Atlantic, to an unknown future. But then, the future had never been knowable.

He thought again about leaving the Bureau, and realized, with each mile that opened up behind him, distancing him from Washington and the life he'd come to take for granted, that this was the right move at the right time. Tunisia was merely an unexpected variable. It was time to leave. He'd worked within the system, in one form or another, from the time he was 18, and he had learned the lesson over and over again that the system was inexorable, and mostly right, but that there was also so much about the federal government that could not be trusted. Bureaucracies fed on themselves--preserving power and systems out of habit and short-sightedness. Change could come, but he no longer had the patience to wait for the slow erosion and evolution.

Mulder's disappearance had signaled more than just another battle in this long engagement that various powers had been waging for decades. Skinner thought that maybe the endgame had finally arrived, and it occurred to him that it might be nice to ride out the final battle with some small measure of freedom.

He drifted into a waking fugue--coherent thought leaving him--lost in the blank endless nothingness of trans-Atlantic flights. Amorphous shapes and memories floating in and out of his consciousness with no pattern or meaning.

He was jolted from his reverie by a sudden lurch and slide of the plane, a jolting, shuddering drop down and then right. Startled cries of passengers and the slide and thump of loose carry-on luggage shattering the white noise of the plane's near silence.

He grabbed the arms of his seat as the plane pitched forward. There was another drop, and a lift, and the plane tilted left and then righted itself, leveling and continuing on--the ride rough, but no worse than traveling a badly paved road.

The captain's voice crackled over the PA system. "Sorry about that, folks, we hit a small wind shear and some unexpected turbulence. We're moving up to try to get over this section of turmoil, but you can expect it to be choppy for a bit. Please keep your seatbelts fastened, and we'll let you know when we're back to smooth skies."

He looked over at Marita, sitting next to him, and was surprised to see her face white, rigidly set. Her hands, when he glanced down were gripping the arms of her seat so tightly that her knuckles were lividly white and red with the effort.

Without stopping to examine the impulse or his motives, he found himself reaching over and taking her hand in his. Her fingers were cold, but her skin was smooth and soft. Startled, she looked up at him. He met her questioning eyes, not knowing exactly what was reflected in his own. The lines of her face eased very slightly. Her mouth opened briefly and he thought she whispered, "thank you," and then she looked away.

Skinner turned back to the window, and watched the threatening clouds roll away beneath them.


	9. Chapter 9

_Somewhere in Alaska_

As usual, no one gave a damn what he thought. "Tunisia? Are you out of your fucking minds? I'm not fucking going back there!"

Scully, deep in discussion with the five men, turned and gave him the "Mulder, you're not playing well with others" look. He wasn't sure whether to be insulted or honored that she would use the same quelling statement on him that she routinely used on her partner. He decided to go with insulted. It suited his current mood better.

"Hey! I'm talking to you, assholes. I'm not going back to Tunisia. There's the small matter of a penal colony there that I'd just as soon never see again. I don't have any idea if my passport will be flagged at entry, but I'm not going to find out. Got it?"

One of the clones looked up. Krycek still found the five completely identical sets of features creepy. He had long known about the Consortium cloning projects, of course, but it was an entirely different matter seeing the results up close and personal. He thought the one who was looking at him might be Kevin, their guide, but it was so damn hard to tell.

"Mr. Krycek, we are well aware of your....situation in regard to the Tunisian authorities. We've taken that into consideration."

 

Evidently that little bit of information was supposed to provide Krycek all the reassurance he needed, as the clone then turned back to the group huddled around the table at the back of the main area.

It was moments like this when Krycek really missed carrying a gun on a regular basis. Wait, he was pretty sure he was carrying one. He started reaching for his waist holster. He stopped the gesture with a frustrated sigh. Too much concrete down here--no telling where a ricochet might go. He really didn't need another bullet scar, and he was pretty sure that if he shot one of the clones and it started leaking toxic gas that it would really piss off Scully. There was never an ice pick around when you needed one.

He stalked back to the couch at the far end of the room and flopped on it with a tired groan. Fuck it. He hurt all over. He was definitely getting too old for this shit.

He tried to ignore the incessant throbbing pain from his stump. He'd been wearing his prosthesis for too long, and the running and tree-climbing had left the scar tissue at the end of his truncated arm inflamed and stinging. He shifted uncomfortably, trying to work up the energy to deal with removing his false arm.

He was lying there, contemplating the essential unfairness of life, when Scully broke from the group and came back to the couch. She stared down at him, her eyes strangely bright, and he realized that she really wasn't seeing him at all. She started to speak once, and then broke off. He waited, swallowing her silence, trying not to set off the landmine of her emotion he could just sense below her surface.

"He's there." Her voice was barely a whisper, but it slid knife-sharp through the quiet.

"Who? What? Oh...." Initial disorientation giving way to comprehension as he watched her face. There could only be one 'he.' He groaned disconsolately. "Tunisia? He's in Tunisia?"

Her nod was distracted; she still wasn't fully with him. "Yeah--they've got several sets of energy readings showing at least two different crafts landing there. Also, they have pictures of a camp there. There was this one group of men...." She broke off for a moment. He watched in fascination as about six different emotions flitted across her face in mere fractions of a second. She was torn, he thought, between some almost uncontainable joy, and some extremely deep worry. Her composure returned almost instantly, but he was left reeling in the wake of her momentary display. "It's going to take the guys a day or so to get our travel documents and arrangements in order, but we're heading out as soon as possible."

"Tunisia?" He knew he sounded like a broken record, but it was impossible to describe what a hellhole the penal colony had been. "So what do we do in the meantime?"

"We need to wait here. Kevin and the rest say the woods are still overrun with the soldiers from the base, and that some of them have set watch on our campsite already."

"So we're stuck here in Never Never Land with the Lost Boys for the next 24 hours, and then I get to find out if they're any good at forging documents or get thrown back into a penal colony?" He was pretty sure he'd earned the right to grumble. At least a little. It was only later that he would wonder why it never occurred to him to just tell her to go to Tunisia without him.

He struggled to sit up. He knew it was a lost cause, but figured he might as well go out arguing. He swore as his prosthesis cut a line of agony across his stump. His statement of pain seemed to snap Scully out of her semi-reverie.

"What is it? Is your stump hurting?" Her voice was clinical, a doctor making a diagnosis. It left no room for him to deflect the question.

"Yeah--it's not really designed for extreme sports."

A quick nod. "After the night you've had, I'm not surprised. Let me take a look. Hang on, I'm sure they've got some general medical supplies here."

He wanted to tell her no. That he would deal with it as he had all along, but she had already pivoted. He watched her purposeful, clean stride across the floor. She returned in a couple of minutes carrying a fairly serious-looking first aid kit.

In silence she helped him shrug out of his jacket and shirt and then he was exposed before her--naked from the waist up, the straps holding his replacement arm lividly cutting across his chest.

He watched her face--braced for pity, anger, a slight revulsion. There had been women since the amputation, and none had been able to escape revealing her reaction at this moment. None of them had been Scully. He suddenly remembered that she routinely cut up dead bodies. But it wasn't just detachment, there was something else he thought he saw beneath the calm blue.

A slight twitch of her eyebrows, and then her eyes narrowed and focused, assessing, weighing the data in front of her. Warm fingers reaching and unfastening the straps and hooks. He reached up to help her and his fingers met hers for a brief moment; he dropped his hand away, scorched, burning. He sat passively as she lowered the synthetic object, and turned her attention to the living, aching end of his upper arm.

Her forehead knit briefly, a clinical compassion as she touched his biceps, and gently ran her fingers along the end, wincing as he flinched away.

"Yeah--you're rubbed pretty raw there. I don't see any immediate signs of infection, though. I'm going to clean and dress it and give you some antibiotics, just as a precaution, and also a light painkiller. It'll take a couple of days to fully recover, but we have at least a day to rest here and we'll assess after that. Let's also try to put some extra padding on the prosthetic for when you travel." He had forgotten what it was to be tended by a healer.

She moved lightly around him. Quickly, but carefully working on his injury. As she cleaned and bandaged him, he let himself sink into a not-quite-conscious state. Let down his guard, and simply gave himself over to her care. Once, as she ran a hand along his shoulder, to smooth down an edge of tape, he came back to awareness just long enough to suppress the shudder that wanted to shake his spine. He inhaled sharply, a mistake, as her scent filled his nostrils.

She took his sudden movement for pain. "I'm sorry. I'm almost done. Just this one last piece." And her hands moved away from him.

He opened his eyes. She was handing him some pills. She waited for him to put them in his mouth before passing him the glass of water she held in her other hand. It's the small compassions that undo you.

He looked at her steadily for a minute, knowing that he wasn't giving anything away. "Thanks. I think I'll get some sleep."

"Good idea. I've got some details to work out with the guys, and then I'm going to crash, too." She straightened up, and without warning, her face drained of color. She swayed for a moment, her eyes closing. In the time that it took for him to reach out to touch her, to try to steady her, she seemed to regain her balance.

She stared off over his head, her hand rubbing her middle, as though soothing an upset stomach. "Damn. I really do need to get some rest." She walked slowly away.

He watched the space she had been occupying for a long while before flopping back down on the couch. For no reason that he could think of, he was suddenly reminded of her dash up the aisle on the plane two days before. Some thought he couldn't quite name began forming just before he fell asleep.

He did not remember his dreams.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_The desert of Tunisia_

The cornfields still glinted improbably in the sunlight. The drone of bees was continuous, a reverberating buzz that combined with the heat rising up from the midday sun created a potent soporific, a feeling of lazy ease that surrounded them, lulled them.

The sense of ease was the most dangerous mirage of all.

The two men stood where they had stood on so many occasions. Strughold, as ever, looked like a European colonist, an almost quaint remnant of a grander, imperial time. The scientist wore a baseball cap. Perhaps he'd finally gotten tired of his fair skin burning and freckling in the unrelenting African sun.

"Now what?" The scientist sounded improbably young. Of course, reflected Strughold, he was only 4 years old. In real terms, that is. The whole age thing and clones was a difficult thing to calculate, and in general Strughold preferred to leave metaphysics to the philosophers.

"Now nothing. We continue as always. Phases three and four should be ready for trial runs in a week or so. And I hear from our North American counterparts that they have recently received a new shipment of supplies and equipment. There was some incident the night of the delivery, but I am assured the intruders have been contained." He wasn't watching the clone, so missed the slight smile that crossed the younger man's face.

They turned and began walking through the rows of corn, pausing to inspect the crops, checking random ears on the stalks. The ears were uniformly perfect.

"I'm still worried about casualty rates."

"As well you should be. I'm not convinced by our latest results, and our vector of delivery, while having many advantages, also is clumsy for many settings. But we will do what we can. We will be ready." The pace of the conversation had a familiar feel to it, the smooth rhythms of practice and repetition underlying it.

Then the scientist managed to surprise Strughold. A cold tone the German had never heard before. "Well, some of us will be." He held the older man's eyes for a long while, and then left him standing in the midst of the gently buzzing field.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_Somewhere in Alaska_

On the whole, she realized, she'd been lucky. Her pregnancy had been extremely easy, only every now and again she'd be hit with a sudden wave of nausea or dizziness. Usually when she was tired, but sometimes for no reason at all. So far no one seemed to have noticed, or least hadn't commented. She hoped Krycek was too self-absorbed to realize that he'd twice caught her in the midst of morning sickness attacks, which, she'd noticed, almost never came in the morning.

She bent back over the table, and traced the faces of the men in the photograph. The telephoto-captured and digitally transmitted picture was grainy, but she stared at it anyway until the images blurred into abstract patterns of black and grey dots. It could be him. He could in this group. The clones had been so very certain, so very convincing that this was the end of her search.

Mulder. Are we finally getting close? Are you really back, somewhere on this planet? I miss you, I miss you.

It was not, she realized, simply that she missed Mulder, her lover. She missed her partner. She missed investigating the unknown with that agile, exciting mind by her side. She missed the small moments of companionship. The knowledge he had of her tiny, obdurate habits--that she didn't speak, at all, until after her first cup of coffee. That after a long day on the road, she needed just 30 minutes completely alone, to sink back down into her center, to refresh her reserves. That she hated more than anything to be interrupted during the mid-part of an autopsy. That a hand on her shoulder at just the right moment told her everything she needed to know about the man at her side.

She missed Mulder. She missed knowing about him. Knowing that he was chipper as hell in the mornings, probably just to annoy her. That he would lose himself so thoroughly in a case that even a piece of pizza waved under his nose was just another annoyance to be swatted away. That he smelled vaguely like a pine forest under his sweat when he was just back from a long run. That his skin between his shoulder blades was soft and smooth.

Damn. The hormones were really getting her tonight. Or maybe it was simply that it had been an appallingly long day...a long series of weeks, and there is a point at which physical and emotional fatigue will not be denied any longer.

She felt sleepiness tugging at her, luring her toward the bedroom that one of the clones had cleared out of for her, a shy deference to her privacy. She glanced over to where Krycek slept, sprawled out on the couch.

It had been so strange traveling with him. A completely different dynamic than traveling with Mulder. And yet, an inexplicable familiarity to it, as well. The sharp expectation of contradiction, the occasional unexpected glimpses of humor. She shook her head. She was unraveling if she was sitting here comparing Krycek with Mulder.

Then another thought hit her. Had she become so isolated from everything and everybody else that Mulder was now her only touchstone? Could she only judge every person and every situation against him and what he would do? She really needed to get out more.

Sleep. Sleep would be a good start. But the fifteen feet to the door of her borrowed bedroom seemed an uncrossable chasm.

In the distant reaches of the underground compound, she thought she heard a phone ring, a startling touch of normality. When you fall through the Looking Glass, you don't expect any of the outside world to follow you.

Krycek muttered something and turned on his side. She watched in idle curiosity to see if he'd fall of the couch. He didn't.

Her thoughts drifted again, asea on the currents of incoherent thought. Tunisia. Africa--calling her back again so soon. Not the Ivory Coast this time, but another ship, and maybe the answer to a different mystery.

 

She had grown up a nomad, moving with her family from assignment to assignment, the clockwork precision of the military tour of duty--two years here, three years there, and always the next post waiting for her. She had not thought she'd be a nomad her whole life, but perhaps this was simply what fate had decreed for her. Certainly the last seven years had been nearly constant travel. And to such unimaginable places.

Kevin, or maybe it was Mark, rushed back into the room. There were moments when she thought she could tell them apart and other moments when she felt trapped in some funhouse mirror hall. "Agent Scully, good news."

She felt the fog lifting away from her. She was surprised at how close to the surface hope lived. "What? Do we have confirmation? Did you get more photos?"

The clone's face fell. "Uh...no, I meant about your travel arrangements. We've got the airline tickets all worked out and are nearly done completing the ground transport arrangements. Also, we've finished all the documentation that you'll need."

"Oh. Thanks. That's great." She wanted to let him know that she did appreciate the work that this announcement represented, but it was simply not the news she wanted to hear.

"And, we're working on determining where you'll have the best chance of meeting up with the rest of your team."

"My what?"

"Your team--Mr. Skinner and Ms. Covarrubias are on their way to Tunis as we speak."

"They are? Why? They weren't planning on going anywhere when I left them just a couple of days ago."

Suddenly Mark, or Kevin, or whoever the hell he was wouldn't meet her eyes. "Ah, well, we...we...uh picked up some information that they were also going to...." If there had been carpet, he would have been scuffing his toe in it.

Fully alert, but still weighted down with exhaustion, she watched him narrowly. "I see. Well, it would be good to have all of us together, I suppose." She could hear her suspicions staining her voice.

"Yeah. There's a lot going on in Tunisia, you know."

"I didn't know, actually, but I suppose I'll find out." She decided that if they were going to kill her they could have done it some time ago, and without the difficulties of sending her to Africa. She decided it was long past her bedtime.

"So, when do we leave?"

"Not for another day or so. We have a couple final arrangements to make."

"Fine. I think I'll get some sleep then."

"That's a good idea. In your condition..." At her sudden stiffening, he reddened and his voice dropped to an almost inaudible stammer. "That is...after the day you've had, I think sleep would be advisable."

She stood there, debating how important it was to find out exactly what the clone knew about her pregnancy. Ultimately, she gave up--she was too tired to argue even with herself.

The bed was narrow, but the sheets were clean, and the mattress offered firm support. Sleep didn't claim her instantly, though. Thoughts of the journey ahead kept her awake for a little while longer.

The desert waited for her. It felt like a final frontier, the last hope of a desperate explorer. _You'd better be there, Mulder, because I'm not sure where I'll look next for you if you're not._


	10. Chapter 10

_Tunisia_

They landed in hell.

At least, for one travel-addled moment, that's all Skinner could think. The heat was a solid wall that he collided with at the door of the plane, and then finally forced his way through, muscles protesting the movement, the fight to wade through the waves of hot vapor rising from the airport's tarmac. Walking down the stairs from the plane to cross the asphalt to the terminal, he squinted ineffectively against the glare of the sun off the silver of the jet and the white of the building in front of them.

God almighty. It might be a dry heat, but it was fucking miserable.

Marita had donned a pair of sunglasses before emerging into the desiccating sun, and she moved effortlessly through the air, smooth blond glide beside him, as they moved into the terminal which was, he thanked every deity he could remember, air conditioned. Once inside the building, he found it easiest to simply follow her, follow her lead. Thinking, at the moment, seemed beyond him. He trailed in her wake, as she guided them quickly and efficiently through the labyrinth of passport control and customs inspection of their luggage.

She switched seamlessly from French to something that sounded like a local dialect of Arabic and then back into English with almost no pause. A brief, cool smile here, a handshake that might also have been passing a bribe there, and an unbelievable 25 minutes later they were standing on a sidewalk outside the terminal, once more wilting in the merciless white-yellow sun of Tunisia. That is, he felt like he was wilting. Marita seemed unchanged from any other time he'd seen her.

He realized that crowds of travelers swirled and swarmed around them. A motley collection of vehicles--cars, trucks, taxis--pulled up the curb and paused, double and triple parking, picking up passengers, and disgorging other travelers, and livestock. A Babel of languages eddied about them. Women, swathed in the traditional Muslim garb that covered them head to toe, led dark eyed children into and out of the terminal. The air smelled of dust, and gasoline, and metal. Skinner suddenly became aware of how very far away Washington was, and how distant all that was known and familiar had grown. The weight of the distance pushed down on him, oppressive and stifling. He wondered if, when he picked up his feet to walk, he would see his own footsteps pressed in the concrete where he'd been standing.

He shook off his strange, melancholy as Marita suddenly raised her hand and gave a piercing whistle. "Ahmed! Over here!"

A battered jeep, that might have once been dark green, screeched to a halt, imposing itself through the chaos of the other vehicles. A cheerful young man wearing jeans and a black shirt hopped lightly out, and began picking up Marita's bags and flinging them in the back. His skin was sun-darkened teak, and his black beard was neatly trimmed. His teeth flashed, a sudden blinding white. "Miss Covarrubias, so good to see you again." He seemed to genuinely mean this. Skinner had the fleeting thought that it was maybe not surprising that the young man would be glad to see a beautiful woman again....but the warmth of the greeting still caught him off guard. He wondered exactly who Ahmed might be.

"And you are?" The young man was now flinging Skinner's bags into the jeep.

"Skinner." He wondered if he needed to explain further, but Ahmed seemed to need no further information.

A quick nod, and their driver was already getting back in the jeep. "Yes, of course. Let's go--it's a long drive out, and we'll want to get moving before the full sun hits."

The full sun? Oh fuck. He climbed into the backseat, cursing his aging body and the foolhardy dedication to his agents and a lost cause that had brought him half-way around the world.

As they pulled out of the airport, Ahmed pointed out a cooler on the floor of the back. "That has fruit and water, Skinner. We will be traveling for about 3 hours before our first stop."

Ingrained habits made Skinner look around, noting the other cases on the floor and in the luggage area behind the backseat. There were canisters of what was probably emergency gasoline. There were also several long, rectangular hard-plastic cases that looked suspiciously like sniper rifle cases, or containers for even heavier weapons.

"Exactly where are we going?" Impossible, even now, in this foreign place, to abandon the patterns of taking command, demanding accountability.

Ahmed responded with a non sequitor, "We'll be traveling about 3 hours." Then he turned to Marita and fired off a question in a language that could have been either French or Arabic.

She threw back her head and laughed--a crystalline, uncomplicated sound that caught Skinner completely off guard. He watched her, torn between startled fascination and something that felt almost like jealousy.

Still smiling, she turned and looked over her shoulder at Skinner. "My apologies, Mr. Skinner, but I need to get an update from Ahmed, and it will go much more rapidly if we converse in Arabic."

Transfixed, he could only nod at her, accepting her smile and her apology with stunned resignation. In this new world of his, he would have to redefine himself and learn new rules.

For the next hour or so, he watched the landscape roll by. After leaving the airport, they quickly traveled through the outskirts of the city, and then through a series of small villages, that each seemed to be composed of a dozen or so buildings, and some tents. As they flew through, he could see children running between houses and goats and cattle wandering in the dusty open spaces behind the dwellings. The highway they were on was more or less paved, but the roads that crossed it were gravel or rutted dirt paths. Soon the spaces between the villages grew longer and longer, and finally they were traveling in pure desert.

The sun was pitiless--clear skies with no hint of clouds dazzled him with a cerulean blue he'd never seen before. The hard-top of the jeep at least provided some artificial shade, and the movement of the air through the open windows provided the illusion of cooling.

In front of him, Marita was engaged in a high speed interrogation of Ahmed. The words flowed past him, distorted and blurred by the roar of the wind through the open windows. For a while he amused himself by trying to follow the conversation strictly on a basis of tone, and twice he thoughthe heard his own name, and once something that might have been 'Krycek,' but the game quickly palled, and he turned his head to watch the unrolling desert, and tried to come to grips with the idea that he was in Africa.

The frenetic series of actions that had been required to get him here had taken such an intense focus of concentration that now that he was here, there was a sense of anti-climax. And yet, there was still a sense of anticipation--of being at a cross-roads, or maybe the edge of the cliff. The next decision he made, he knew somehow, would be one of the most important he'd ever made. Or maybe it was only that for the first time in years he was free to make any decision he wanted to, and he could no longer remember what that felt like.

Inevitably found himself wondering how Scully and Krycek were doing in Alaska. What had they found? How were they doing traveling together? They too, seemed impossibly far away, and not fully real. Out here, in this trackless expanse of sand, it was difficult to imagine that a place like Alaska even existed.

 

What was he doing here?

He looked at the front again, Marita was frowning--she appeared annoyed, or maybe even vaguely frightened by what Ahmed was telling her. It seemed to Skinner that she was being told something that was causing her to change her gameplan. He wondered at what point he had learned her statements that well.

The ceaseless noise of the wind through the windows and the underlying rumble of the engine turned into an improbable lullaby, and Skinner surrendered himself to the sleep that had eluded him for so many weeks. 

His last thought, as he sank beneath the rim of consciousness, was that the last time he'd slept, he'd felt the cool press of Marita's fingers in his own.

 

The sounds of chickens woke him. He shifted into awareness as his dreams of planes that flew and flew and never landed gave way to the incessant clucking of chickens. Chickens?

He sat up groggily, and realized the jeep had stopped and was parked in front of a pair of mud-colored buildings. There was a rusty white Renault parked to the side of the farthest building, but other than that, there was no sign of life.

The driver's seat was empty, but Marita was twisted in her seat, looking back at him. Her normal guarded statement returned quickly when she realized he was awake. Still fighting his way to full wakefulness, he struggled to recognize the statement she had been wearing just before she realized his eyes were open.

"Where are we? Are we there?"

For a moment a warm smile crossed her face. It seemed to want to linger. "Well, we're somewhere. This is rest stop. We'll get gas, and have a chance to stretch our legs before making the final push to where we'll stay tonight. Amed is getting Ibrahim to turn on the gas pump."

He looked out the window again, and now realized there was a lone pump in front of the near building. On closer inspection, the near building appeared to be some kind of store.

"I don't suppose they sell Cokes in there?" A sudden longing for something familiar swept him.

Now she did laugh, and this time the smile stayed. "They sell Cokes everywhere, Mr. Skinner. I'm going to change into more comfortable clothes. You might want to do the same." With that, she exited the jeep, and moved around the back, to take out her smaller duffel bag.

He sat for a moment longer, sorting through thoughts that refused to resolve into any sort of logical pattern, and finally followed her.

Even the Coke was somewhat strange--the classic red-and-white can lettered in Arabic, and the taste not quite what he recalled. Somewhat sweeter, a little hint of some other spice. But it was an anchor to the reality he came from.

He changed into khakis and a dark-blue polo shirt. The new clothes helped to restore him a bit. A fresh exterior to mask the transforming and reforming interior.

Marita changed into a khaki shirt and faded jeans, and when she emerged from the bathroom, Skinner almost didn't recognize her. It was as though crossing the border into Tunisia had transformed her. Released her from some kind of confinement. As though this other Marita had always been waiting beneath the tailored exterior that was all he had ever seen of her. This other Marita who was still very complex and dangerous, but freer, and therefore maybe even more dangerous. Her loose stride back to the jeep was panther-like.

When they began their journey again, he was surprised to find Marita climbing in the back with him. At his statement, she explained, "I need to give you some of the background, and it's too noisy to shout at you from the front seat."

So, with Ahmed playing their noncommittal chauffeur, Marita laid out the events that had brought them there.

"As you must know, I worked for the Consortium for a number of years. My primary role was to act as a liaison to the representatives from various nations who were part of the Consortium's compact, and to gather critical information from various United Nations programs.

"Given the UN's involvement in nearly every aspect of human life around the globe--health, education, peace-keeping and economic development--you can imagine the Consortium wanted to keep close watch on some of the data UN workers were collecting and had access to. 

"My other job, of course, was to feed misinformation to certain parties at strategic junctures." She had maintained direct, piercing eye contact through the early part of her recital, but now she dropped her eyes for a moment. Her discomfort did not last long enough for Skinner to ask her what had changed. Why she had changed allegiances, or seemed to have.

"For the last five years, the primary goal of the Consortium has been to develop an effective weapon against the alien colonists. The research and work has been focused on developing a vaccine against the main threat from the aliens: the viruses that we think they will use to wipe out or control the majority of the human population. Agent Scully was saved by a prototype of one of those vaccines. But, what we have discovered is that there are several strains of the virus, and, more frighteningly, that each of the major families of the viruses seems capable of quickly mutating and adapting so that vaccines do not stay effective for very long. The effects of these viruses is not be underestimated."

A sudden shudder washed over her, and she seemed lost in some violent memory. The silence gaped for a minute, and then two. He reached over and placed a gentle hand on her arm. "Ms. Covarrubias?" She started under his touch, a flush creeping across her cheekbones. 

"I'm sorry. It's just...." she trailed away, shaking her head. "It's not important."

She continued her narrative, a new tone of resolve evident. "There were at least four concurrent vaccine efforts underway eighteen months ago when the majority of the Consortium's leadership was burned to death at that airbase in West Virginia."

She gave a mirthless laugh. "I'm sure you're wondering what all of this has to do with us, and why we're here."

He nodded, although more to keep her talking than out of any real impatience to connect all the dots.

"Please note I said that almost all of the leadership was burned. Three major players survived. One was C.B.G. Spender, the man you call the smoking man. The second was a Brit named John Byron Aston. The third was Konrad Strughold."

Skinner recalled the pictures he'd seen of the warehouse. The rows of charred objects that only resolved into bodies on close inspection. The conflagration was total, and yet, the puzzle that had never been solved had been that only the bodies had burned. The floor where the men and women had been standing, which should have shown extensive scorch marks, was untouched. He felt a cold knot in the pit of his stomach. Man had always needed and feared fire. There is nothing else which destroys so completely.

"These three were the only real remnants left of what was once a global operation. Spender survived because he has the survival instincts of a cockroach and he managed to run away just at the last moment. Aston survived by pure dumb luck--his flight from Singapore was delayed. But Strughold survived because he refused to leave his experiments at what he claimed was an absolutely critical phase of trials. It was the only time he ever disobeyed a direct Consortium order, and was very out of character for him. Spender later speculated to me that Strughold must have had some kind of inside information about what was going to happen that night. Strughold and his experiments are why we're here."

There should have been some dramatic musical accompaniment to that announcement, he thought. Instead there was only the wind, and the thrum of the tires on the road.

"What are these experiments?"

"Vaccines, Mr. Skinner. Work with alien material and technology. But I have some information that leads me to believe that Strughold decided two years ago to deviate from the Consortium research agenda and has created a sub-experiment that may be more dangerous than I'd even initially thought."

"Is Ahmed your contact? Is he working with Strughold? And what is the nature of this danger?" Some of his reserves replenished from his earlier sleep, he felt the logical frameworks of an investigation forming around him again. The suspicion ran granite-hard through his tone. He thought he saw the young man react to the use of his name, but focused all his attention on Marita.

She gave a small smile. "No. Ahmed's in contact with my contact, and he's a reporter with a local paper, not one of the scientists." She sobered. "The danger is the unknown, Mr. Skinner, as it always is. There is some new variable in the experiments and the early results are ambiguous, but the potential in the data is...disturbing."

She was reverting to the enigma he had first known her as. He watched her, trying to decide what angle to pursue. The unanswered questions jostling restlessly in his mind, vying for priority.

"What does any of this have to do with Mulder?" He was suddenly afraid that he'd been brought here under false pretenses--diverted from the one thing he knew he had to accomplish.

She read him instantly. "There are a number of strange alliances involved in all this. And Mulder has been, as nearly as I can determine, caught up in the struggle between two of them. I don't pretend to understand all the details, but I am sure that Mulder is here somewhere, and that it relates to Strughold's work."

Even having acknowledged to himself what it was that he'd seen in Oregon, Skinner still found it difficult to piece together all that he knew with what he'd just been told and to come to the most logical conclusion. "So Stughold is working with the aliens?"

She nodded slowly. "With some of them. Or maybe more than one group."

"There's more than one group?" He hated this feeling of being perpetually four steps behind. But then again, if there was one group of aliens, why not more than one?

"Yes, at least two major groups, and I've been suspecting for a while that there may be a third."

"What do we know about them?"

"Precious little. The first group, the ones we've known about for the longest period of time, is the one that was in league with the Consortium--an alliance that is decades old. The second group is in rebellion against the first."

"I see." Although he really didn't. Stubbornly trying to fight his way through the facts. "And we are here because...?"

"Because we need to find Mulder who is key to all of this somehow, and because we need to get the data on these tests that Strughold has been running."

"Tests?"

A fine impatience showed itself in her statement. "The tests in Italy and Florida."

"And if we succeed, what then?" It occurred to him that he had no clear vision of anything beyond the next task.

"We'll cross and burn that bridge when we get to it." And so maybe she was improvising her plans as well.

They drove the remaining three hours in silence.

Their resting place for the night was a small house on the outskirts of a village. They reached it just past sundown, and in the dimming light, Skinner could only see that it was a low,rectangular building that appeared abandoned from the exterior. Once inside, however, the house turned out to be sparsely, but comfortably furnished. There was a small central common room that included a kitchenette, two bedrooms, and a bathroom.

No explanation was offered about the owner of the house, but Marita moved through it with an air of easy familiarity. They unloaded all the bags and gear from the jeep, and then Ahmed surprised him by disappearing back out the door. He heard the jeep start up and pull away.

He glanced, slightly wild eyed, over at Marita, who shrugged. "He always stays with Ria. He'll be back in the morning."

They ate a quick supper from some supplies in the kitchen--bread, a white, crumbly cheese, and some of the fruit from the cooler. He thought they talked about something trivial, but five minutes later wasn't sure if either of them had spoken a word. A long strange trip.

Marita indicated the first bedroom. "You can take that one." She started walking down the hall, and then paused. She looked back over her shoulder. "Good night. Sleep well." Her voice soft.

It had been years since he'd been this far from "civilization." The night, in the absence of streetlights and other nearby dwellings, was almost pitch black--only a tiny bit of star and moonlight illuminating his room through the window. It was also nearly noiseless. The lack of ambient light and noise was unnerving at first, and he found himself laying on the bed, eyes open and straining up toward the ceiling, alert to any small sound.

The room was hot, but beginning to cool off from the breeze through the window. He recalled that at night, temperatures in deserts could drop by as much as 50 degrees from the daytime high. He felt his body relaxing against the sheets, his breathing evening out. His thoughts slowed too, releasing from the tensions and strange revelations of the day.

The footsteps along the hallway were soft, but sure, the sound yanking him up from the semi-consciousness that had claimed him. There was a tap at his door, and it swung open.

She was standing just inside the doorway, the light surrounding her blinding him in contrast to the black of his room. Without his glasses, she was nothing more than a silhouette, a slender apparition, and for a moment he thought her slender form was someone else entirely, but then the unfamiliar feel of the bed and smells of the desert reclaimed his consciousness, and he knew her.

"Ms. Covarrubias?"

She took a step into the room, but still didn't say anything, as the door swung shut behind her. His eyes, beginning to adjust to the small amount of light cast through the window, saw that she was wearing a black silky nightgown. It was held up by two narrow straps, and flowed down over her, a stark and undeniably erotic contrast to her skin.

His breath caught as she continued to move toward him, stopping a hand's-breadth away from where he lay. Her face was unreadable, cast into indistinct planes and shadows that only suggested her beauty. She looked down at him for an eon or two, and then slowly she reached out her hand. His own lifted to meet it, and when their fingers met and tangled, he was surprised to feel her tugging him up, out of the bed.

He rose from the bed to stand in front of her, not quite touching, but close enough that he could feel the heat from her body, smell her intricate feminine scent. She inhaled sharply, and brought a hand up to his chest, resting it lightly against the skin just over his heart, and then trailing her fingers along his skin, stopping to tangle in his chest hairs. He shivered under her touch, and raised his hands to frame her face.

Her pale hair fell through his fingers, molten moonlight, and she was warmer beneath his touch than he'd expected.

This was not a time for words. He leaned over and kissed her, gently, tentatively. She met him with a blazing hunger, and he felt the fire burn away any doubts or fears he had remaining. He stepped willingly into her flame.

 

Later, he watched her sleeping. She was curled on her side, facing him, and he resisted the urge to stroke back her hair, to touch the silky smooth skin that stretched thin and delicately over her collarbone.

He purposely did not think about what this meant. Right now, he didn't dare assign meaning to anything.

He remembered her face as she moved beneath him, the bittersweet play of joy and sorrow that flitted across her features like clouds chasing each other across a perfect sky. He recalled the sensation of her small, strong body around his. The perfect fit of their joining. The wordless sigh of her release, followed a minute late by his involuntary groan.

No, he would not think about this. There would be tomorrow for all of that. He watched her sleep. For now this was all he needed to know.

She sighed and turned over, mumbling words in some unidentifiable language. He curved his body around hers, and slept.


	11. Chapter 11

_Tunisia_

She hated cliches. She'd fought against them for most of her life--"the weaker sex," "dumb blondes"--the stereotypes and casually demeaning archetypes that had, in so many ways, constrained her own ambition and abilities. And yet, they haunted her.

Marita stood by the lone window in the living room, watching the sky shift from absolute black to the first suggestion of dark grey. The cup of tea in her hand had long since cooled, only a vague scent of mint and smoke rising up from the glassy brown surface, a subtle counterpoint to the sterile anonymity of the room.

She was motionless, but her thoughts roiled and jumbled. She had made a horrible mistake. There was no time for this sort of complication, and she had utterly no excuse for this lapse in self-discipline. And yet. And yet, she had slept dreamlessly, and woken feeling safe for the first time in years. So, was this it? Was this all it took? A night with a good man? She hated cliches.

She stifled the urge to go back to his bedroom. To stand and watch him in the gradually brightening dawn, to crawl into the tangled sheets and wrap herself around his solid body. To surrender to the need and hunger she had almost forgotten existed within her. The hunger she remembered--she gave a fleeting thought to Alex--but the need, ah, that was something else entirely.

There was no time. And, she would not give into the cliche. She would not.

She let her mind wander for a moment--to recall the sensation of his heavy, sweat-slicked body thrusting against hers. The masculine musk mingling with her own lighter scent to wrap them in a cocoon of heat and sex and hunger. Her stomach tightened, a tingle low and urgent in her belly. She wanted him, she needed him. She shook her head. There was no time for this nonsense.

She sighed noiselessly. Her ability to focus was a point of pride for her, and they were in the middle of a critical mission. What on earth had overtaken her last night?

For a big man, he could move silently. The hand on her shoulder almost caused her to drop the cup she was holding. He moved back immediately at her instinctive flinch at his touch.

"I didn't mean to startle you." His voice a gravelly morning whisper.

She met his eyes reluctantly, afraid, for the first time that she could remember, of what she might betray. "It's okay." She paused, agonizingly aware of how fragile the moment was. The next thing she said or did, she thought, might tip the scales forever in a direction she didn't intend. She drew a breath, not entirely sure what she was about to say, but he preempted her.

He stepped into her space, breaching every barrier, and he reached up and trailed large, gentle fingers along the side of her face. He paused, his hand cupping the back of her neck, his thumb stroking her jawline. His eyes, without the usual barrier of his glasses, were exposed and she could see the steel in his soul--the strength that had drawn her--and something else flickering warm and unexpected in the brown-hazel depths.

They stood looking at each other for a boundless minute of clarity, and then she nodded, an answer to a question she thought later he hadn't even realized he'd asked.

He bent over and kissed her gently, almost chastely, then stepped back.

"What's the plan for today? Do we head out to Strughold's compound?" In a single sentence, he fluidly made the transition back to the operation that brought them here. He resumed his customary professional demeanor, and handed her the small measure of control she needed to resume hers. She experienced the tiniest pang of regret at the passing of the moment, pushed it aside. They had to concentrate on the immediate concerns.

"Yes. Ahmed will be back in an hour or so, and we'll head out to begin surveillance. The information he gave me yesterday was a bit worrisome. It seems like some of the activity with the bees has stepped up, which might mean another set of tests. If that's true, we'll need to stop them."

"Us and what army?" His wry humor caught her off guard.

"Well, I do expect my associates to have..." She trailed off, suddenly aware that she'd neglected to let him know about an important factor, and he was likely to be annoyed at the omission. Oh hell. She pushed on.

"Well, I expect that Agent Scully and Alex will meet us at the rendezvous point." She braced for his reaction.

Which was mild. "So Scully and Krycek are meeting us here? That will be helpful, but I expect the compound will have more than four guards?" His mildness, she realized was deceptive; he was not pleased at all. He was simply waiting to see what else she might reveal. Waiting for all the facts before reacting. He was, she recalled, a true professional.

"You're right. But, compared to other Consortium facilities this is fairly lightly guarded--they clearly don't expect anyone to even know they're there, let alone take any action against them. We may also have some help from...inside."

"May?" His jaw clenched. "You want to explain that? Basing an operation on possible assistance is usually....unwise." His tone starting to shift to something more overtly command-like.

She winced. "I know I haven't given you a lot to go on here, but I promise to provide you more information on the way out to the compound. Alex and Agent Scully left Alaska on schedule and I expect them here this morning. It would be better if we were there when they arrived."

Something that might have been disappointment marred his features, and then his normal impassivity returned. He nodded sharply. "OK."

She watched him turn and walk back to his room. For no reason she could fathom, she thought of quicksand.

 

Ahmed returned punctually. They loaded up the jeep, and resumed their travel with a minimum of fuss. She climbed in the back with Skinner again, debating exactly what to tell him. The basic facts were easy enough, but there was so much more than the facts. She decided to start with the simple truths.

"I've been working, for the past two years, with a group of men who are part of Strughold's primary research team. Our alliance started when they realized that Strughold was deviating from the main research agenda. We have not been able to act openly, but we have kept each other informed of results from all the concurrent projects. When possible, we have tried to subvert, or at least mitigate some of the most...disastrous outcomes that the experiments might have had. We have not always been able to effect that. But, after the conflagration in West Virginia, one small group of my associates was able to escape and set up a...operations center of sorts."

"Escape?" He missed so little. His tone was sharp, but not too suspicious. "Are these, were these men prisoners?"

"It's difficult to explain. But, in essence, they have no choice but to stay on the compounds. It will become clearer once we're out there."

He nodded for her to continue. "The group in the ops center made contact with Agent Scully and Krycek out in Alaska. It's that group that rescu...that made the travel arrangements to get them out to site where we'll meet today." She could only hope he wouldn't notice her slip. She was not yet ready to reveal everything.

"Why is your operations base in Alaska?" Of the many questions he might have asked, she hadn't anticipated that one.

"It was convenient." One of several factors, but also true.

"Have you heard from your associates about what it was that Scully and Krycek found up there, if anything?"

"Only a few details. We'll have to get the full story from them." Less than fully truthful, but a necessary vagueness.

Then his tone was unyielding. "What else haven't you told me?" And there was the question she'd been dreading.

She lay the truth bare. "More than I've told you." She watched the sense of betrayal start to stain his face. She reached out, before she could stop herself, taking his hand from his knee. "But, I promise you--it's nothing that will endanger us, or the others. There are simply people I still have to protect. There are reasons..." Her voice weak in her own ears, but there were things that couldn't be explained yet.

Her breath caught as she watched him struggle between suspicion and doubt, and the human need to believe in something or someone. So much depended on his decision.

He wasn't happy, but he finally he shrugged. "Let's see what Scully and Krycek say." He very gently let go of her hand.

It wasn't quite what she'd hoped for, but it was more than she'd expected.

 

Not surprisingly, Krycek was miserable and letting everyone know about it.

They parked the jeep a half kilometer from the rendezvous point, and hiked in through the low hills. Marita could hear him complaining from more than 200 meters away.

"...and have I mentioned lately how much I hate this fucking heat?" Definitely unhappy. She risked a glance at Skinner who was smiling in grim amusement. She heard some kind of murmured response from Scully, followed by the worried chorus of the clones.

They crested the last hill, to find the group of five waiting for them. Scully, Krycek and three of the clones were standing in a loose circle, oblivious to the compound stretching low and surreally green across the valley just below them. The sharp dry sounds of cicadas and locusts were overlaid with a softer drone.

The air was crystal dry, and smelled of dust, and something sweetly savory. Rosemary, perhaps.

Krycek's complaints were cut off abruptly as he spotted them. "About fucking time. You want to explain what this is all about?" His broad angry gesture seemed to encompass everything--the green in the valley, their presence in Tunisia, the existence of clones, and perhaps the fundamental riddles of the entire universe.

"Nice to see you, Alex. I trust your trip went well." She had always loved upsetting his balance. Meeting his off-kilter fury with a bland courtesy. She turned to Scully. "And Agent Scully, how are you doing?"

She scarcely heard Scully's "I'm fine." The agent did not look well. She seemed tired, drawn, and in some way diminished. A cold gnawing seized Marita's gut as she looked at Dana Scully. Oh god. Please let her be okay. Please let....

Skinner moved toward Scully--Marita had the fleeting impression that he wanted to hug her, except that neither of them were the type. She watched him move toward his agent and stop, awkwardly, a mere foot away from her. "What happened up there, Agent...Scully? Did you find anything? Are you okay?" The quick, interrogative tone didn't hide the deeper concern.

"Well, we found something, sir, some kind of ship, and there were men, and some....humans. But it's not quite clear what was going on. Then we got spotted, and we had to take off before we saw... And, we ran into....Kevin and some others like him." She indicated one of the red-haired men who had retreated to a small clump to the side of them. She was simply tired beyond endurance, thought Marita. Scully couldn't even report coherently--something she had not ever expected to see.

Skinner watched her, his concern evident. Oddly, the presence of three completely identical red-haired men didn't seem to phase him in the least. Then he turned to Krycek. "Krycek--what the hell happened?"

As Krycek began to fill in the details from the Alaskan excursion--details she had long since received from her contacts, Marita drifted over to the three other men who were standing on the hill.

The clones were clones, and physically identical in eerie duplication. But, they did have small individual quirks, and she had learned, over the past year, to distinguish them. She turned to Kevin.

"Was it him?"

"Yes, definitely. I was surprised, given the earlier report, to see him back in Alaska so quickly, but it was him."

She had known it already, but needed to hear the information confirmed in person. "Do you think he knew who was watching the exchange? That it was Agent Scully and Krycek?"

Kevin shrugged, exchanging glances with Mark, who had also traveled in from their northern encampment. "I don't know....probably not, but you just can't tell."

So many unknowns. "What about the data? What are your conclusions?"

All three men exchanged glances this time, and finally Mark spoke reluctantly. "The same as the last time we talked. There is some change involved. We'd need a six-month study, at a minimum, to determine the full scope, but all the early indicators are that....well, that the change is what we feared, and permanent."

She gazed out past their shoulders, staring unseeingly at the green below her. Trying to untangle the knotted skeins of facts that surrounded them. Trying to find the one strand to follow out of the labyrinth.

There was so much work to do. And very little time left. The smoking man had been a pretentious bastard, prone to overstating the facts, his own importance, and just about everything else, but he'd been right about one thing, as it turned out. The time was at hand.

She walked back over to where Skinner seemed to be wrapping up his cross-examination of Alex. "....flames? They were carrying flame-throwers?"

Scully's tired voice interjected over Krycek's exasperated retort. "They looked like flame throwers, but I don't think....I don't think it was exactly normal technology. I...when I saw them, I had a flashback to the bridge in Pennsylvania. You know--when Cassandra Spender disappeared."

Skinner recoiled physically at her words. "You mean when everyone was burned."

Scully regarded him steadily. "Yes."

Then he did walk over to her and place a hand gently on her shoulder. He spoke to her in a low voice, asking a question that Marita couldn't quite hear. She looked him in the eyes for a long time, and then simply shook her head. He spoke to her again, low and urgent, and then the two of them walked a little distance away.

Marita watched them for a second, trying to sort out her emotions, when her musing was interrupted by the surprisingly calm voice of Alex Krycek behind her. "So, what's the story, babe?" 

She stiffened reflexively. She hated to be called "babe." Then she relaxed, realizing with a small shock that Alex was teasing her. It was so unexpected that she found herself smiling as she turned to him.

"The same story it's always been, Alex. Mystery, conspiracy, the quest for global domination." She lost her smile. "The search to build a better mousetrap."

She let that sink in for a moment. Knowing that he would understand. He paled and looked over her shoulder to where Skinner stood, still talking to Scully. His voice was so low she could barely hear him.

"Did you tell him?"

"No." Her answer was clipped.

"Why not?" He seemed genuinely curious.

"There wasn't a good time." She shut down his line of inquiry with her usual ruthlessness. "What did you tell her?"

"Nothing. There was no time." His reply had a tone of near mockery, but nothing she could openly fault him for. "What's next?"

She looked back over her shoulder to Scully and Skinner, who had moved further away, partly down the slope of the hill. Scully seemed to be upset about something. Somber, but also vehemently opposed to what Skinner was saying. Skinner simply looked stubbornly resolute. A doctor repeating news to a patient that the disease was chronic, but probably not immediately life threatening.

"I'm not sure. We've got to verify the next test sequence, and then, if necessary shut it down."

Krycek groaned, his head tilting back as he contemplated the alien sky. "Oh fuck, Marita. A full-scale op at..." he glanced at his watch, "whatever the hell time it is here?"

She was replying that they would have to do some surveillance first, when the tornado arrived.

At least a tornado seemed the most rational explanation at first.

The air abruptly grew still around them, and the insects all simultaneously ceased their songs. It felt like the oxygen had been sucked out of the atmosphere, and suddenly the winds howled down like an ancient avenging god. The winds staggered them, and ultimately drove them to their knees, and then to the ground.

The sand and dirt blew around them--gritty and relentless--abrasive against their skin, a raw power of its own, choking them, infiltrating their clothing.

There was a screaming overhead that was louder even than the winds, a bright metal shriek.

The sun was blotted out, and still the sand and dirt rained down on them.

The shadow moved endlessly across them, across the hill where they cowered, down over the valley.

Silence returned. Absolute silence that felt like a death.

Then slowly, slowly a faint chirp, and buzz, and the insect kingdom regained its domain. A soft breeze brushed her.

Marita raised her head slowly. Looking around to see if the world still stood around her. Beside her she heard a muffled grunt as Krycek began levering himself off the ground. He stood and looked around warily, and then reached down to help her up to her feet. They stood dusting themselves off, wordless, bereft of any language to ask even the first question.

Then from down the hill, a shout, and three people struggling up the battered grass. Skinner, his arm around a figure who sagged between him and Scully. A tall man, with dark hair, and eyes, that had they been open, would have gleamed hazel in the once-more bright sun.

And Mulder was returned to them.


	12. Chapter 12

_Safe House, Tunisia_

He was warm beneath her fingers. Of all the wonders, this was both the smallest and the most profound. She had dreamed of this moment so many times. Imagined its smallest details. But the heat and slight damp of his skin was still startling. The scent of him rising up to her nostrils grounding her in sudden, tangible reality.

She straddled him, her hands resting lightly on his chest--arrested in mid-gesture by the sudden knowledge that this was real. It was really them.

She let herself fall into his eyes.

Lost in a tangle of thoughts. This can't be happening. This is really happening. Please let this be real. Should we be doing this? There is so much else we need to do, to talk about. But I want this. I want this.

She realized she'd stopped moving altogether, and had drifted to some other place. Mulder's laugh brought her back. "Earth to Scully? Where are you?"

"I'm here with you, Mulder." She could feel the joy exploding in her chest, drenching her in sweetness. She felt it radiating through her, spilling over to wrap them both in unseen light.

It sobered him. "Yeah. You are. You really are." He tugged her down into a soul-destroying kiss. Burning away the residual fears and anger and longing of the weeks of separation. Refining them in the crucible of their own truths and mysteries.

He thrust up against her, moving within her, dark, hard, sweet force. She gasped against his mouth, feeling a small shock wave rise up, low and rolling through her belly. He grinned in response, and pressed upward again. "You're here, I'm here, we're here." Chanting a mantra of nonsensical hope; thrusting with each phrase.

He rolled them, settling her beneath him as his rhythm intensified. She felt him inside her--deep and complete. The sensation of surrounding him once more was homecoming and brand new discovery.

He kissed her again--slow, lingering--an erotic contrast to the urgent, inexorable rhythm of their hips. Thrust and parry, counterpoint. Rocking to an irresistible beat.

He pulled back just far enough to see directly into her eyes--holding her a willing prisoner in his gaze. She was captured, bound, in thrall to this man who was pulling her ever further from herself, sending them both spiraling outward on this path of passion and white-hot sensation. A coil of heat and tension unwound within her--twisting up from the point where they were joined, and curving along her body, her limbs.

Now, and now, and oh there, and oh...."Mulder!" She was swept under by the tidal wave of her release--the spasms shuddering through her core, her arms locking vise-like around him.

He stilled, allowing her to ride out the mind-shattering intensity of the sensations cascading through her, and then just as she began to quiet, he moved again--sharp, hard thrusts, no more than a half-dozen--until he, too, was swept out to sea.

He collapsed against her, breath erratic, ragged. She could feel his heart beating, hard, frantic. His heavy weight pressing her into the soft mattress.

Her hands moved over his back, long, soothing strokes. Gentle caress through his hair. He was here, beneath her fingers. He was here.

After a long, sweet while, they slept.

 

She awoke some hours later, and her first panicked thought was that it had only been a dream. But then the sounds of Mulder's even breaths reached her through the stillness. She felt the weight of the arm across her stomach. She relaxed back against him--feeling his long body curled around hers. Feeling the solid reality of him holding her tight. She had always loved sleeping like this with him. Not being able to see him, but knowing, absolutely that he was there, behind her. That they faced the same direction--together.

Finally she realized that she wasn't going to be able to go back to sleep. As tired as she was, her brain was racing--trying to sort out all that had happened, and to make sense of the strange events that had brought them here.

She eased herself out of Mulder's embrace. He grumbled sleepily, and turned over.

She moved quietly to the living room, and found a plain but comfortable chair.

The night was quiet around her. The stillness of an almost unpopulated area was so foreign to her. None of the usual anchors to the outside world--no streetlights, no sound of passing cars. It was almost as though she were lost, floating alone in her own isolated universe. And yet, she thought she could feel him sleeping in the room behind her. Could feel the ties that bound her to him. The ties that bound them on levels so deep that years of excavation would never be able to describe or catalog them all.

There was so much to try to sort out.

He was back. She still hadn't told him the news. The child growing inside her that was theirs. The miracle that would change them, again, in ways that still frightened her to think about.

When he'd run his hands along her body, they had paused at her fuller breasts, the now gently rounded belly. His touch had been questioning, but in his eyes there had been no shock of recognition or intuitive leap about what the subtle changes might mean. His hands had known what his agile but overwhelmed mind hadn't been able to reason out.

It was time to share this news with him, but she couldn't help but worry a little at his reaction. They had never discussed children. Had not really ever discussed their future, if there would be one. They had found each other in the improbable chase for truth, amidst conspiracies and aliens, and so many unexplained things. It sometimes seemed to her that their love was just one more unexplained phenomenon that they were investigating together.

She closed her eyes against the dark of the room--remembering again the brightness of their coming together.

So much darkness. But there was this spark of hope.

Hope. Her exhausted mind was skipping randomly from thought to thought. Tenuous connections between ideas. Something tugged at her memory, and she found herself replaying the events of the afternoon, just before Mulder had been brought back.

She had been so relieved to see Skinner--his substantial, real presence a comforting link back to the few things she could still say with any certainty that she really knew. He was a constant in her otherwise increasingly uncertain world. And she was so tired of being continually surprised.

When he walked over to where she stood and asked her, in that dearly familiar gruff tone, if she were okay, she wanted to throw herself in his arms, simply for the relief of holding fast to that one small reality.

But once more reality slid sickeningly awry around her.

It had seemed to her at first that he, too, had thought to maybe reach out to her physically: touch her, briefly embrace her, but then he stopped just short of her personal space, and something about the way he held himself--near, but with a slight formality--set off warning bells in her mind. Something had changed, her tired mind realized, and although she couldn't begin to analyze what it might be, she knew it was momentous.

She had been too weary to give any sort of coherent report of what had happened in Alaska, so she'd let Krycek carry the narrative, interjecting only when Alex had gotten completely derailed in some rant or other about the various indignities to which he'd been subjected.

The revelation about the men who'd been carrying the fire throwers seemed to unsettle Skinner more than it should have. It caused him to finally breach the perimeter of no-contact that he'd unconsciously set up between them--reaching out to her, settling his large hand on her shoulder, searching her face to see if she were really okay. Then he'd asked if he could speak to her privately. Krycek had shrugged, a "what the fuck do I care?" shrug, if such a thing were possible with a single muscle twitch, and wandered over to talk to Marita.

Skinner led her away from the others. But once they were out of earshot of the rest, he seemed reluctant to begin speaking. He cleared his throat, and looked down. Finally, when he did look up, his statement was so serious that she could only think that something horrible had happened.

"Ag....Scully." Skinner's voice was as close to uncertain as she'd ever heard it. "You need to know something." He paused again while her mind tried frantically to imagine what could be so wrong. "I've resigned from the FBI. Effective three days ago."

Her tattered control gave way. "What!?" After his nod, she stood in stunned disbelief while the news fully sunk in. "No. You can't mean that! What were you thinking? Why....?" She didn't even have the words to articulate the full extent of her shock.

"It's not really your business, Scully." His tone was gravely polite, but he was plainly taken aback at the vehemence of her reaction. "I just wanted you to know. In case....when you return to the Bureau, you will have a different supervisor. I think I've arranged it so that Susan Jameson will have oversight of the X-Files." He stopped, probably realizing that she didn't care about that sort of detail. "Anyway, it was time. Past time, really..." He trailed off, gazing at something in the far distance that wasn't anywhere near this latitude or longitude.

"But...." She paused, choking on her fear and anger and a subterranean sorrow. "But...what if they're wrong, and Mulder isn't here? What if we have to go back to DC to keep looking? Then what? How will you direct...?"

"Scully, you knew the FBI wasn't ever going to find Mulder. If we have to start the search again, we'll use....other avenues. And, you're still an active agent." His tone gentle now.

"I know, but what will you do? Why did you resign?" This was too much to absorb. She couldn't help but wonder what would happen to her. Didn't he know how much she needed him? How much she had come to rely on him, both professionally and personally? 

He looked at her, and then away. His voice came from an unfathomable distance. "I had to, Scully. I've seen and done things that..."

She had to stop him. This confession was moot. No matter what, he was still Skinner and she needed to let him know that for her, his honor was unquestionable. "We've all seen and done things, Skinner. It's what happens when you get involved with this conspiracy." Her tone was harsh, trying to shock him.

Now he looked directly at her, the weight of his own sorrow and loss clear to her for the first time. "No. I've done things...." He broke off, struggling with burdens that suddenly she didn't want to hear. "I've done things that can never be rectified. I've justified them, rationalized them. And they were, I still believe, necessary within the larger context. But I can't take them back, and I can't make them right. I'll never be able to."

Her breath caught. His tone was so bleak that for a moment all she could think of was the barren ice fields of Antarctica.

"I had to leave. It was only a question of time. And this time was as good as any."

She moved forward and placed a hand on his arm, trying to ground herself. To verify with physical touch that she was really here and this was happening, and not simply some strange nightmare. And watching him, and the shifting shadows in his eyes, there was only one thing to say.

"I'm sorry." She wasn't sure those were quite the right words, but they were the only words she could find.

He shook his head gently, and gave a ghost of a smile. "There's nothing to be sorry for. Things change. This is just one more of them."

Afterward she would never be able to say with certainty who moved first. There was simply a movement, and he was holding her. They clung to each other for a long moment--simply holding each other, not moving, just clinging to this tiny fragment of comfort.

She heard him exhale shakily, and then he gently disengaged himself from their embrace. She was looking up to ask him what they were going to do next when the world's sounds died around them.

Instantly on alert, she saw him also reaching for the weapon at his waist. Without pausing to discuss it, they moved so they stood back-to-back, scanning their surroundings for incoming danger.

The danger arrived from the sky.

The winds whipped across the hillside where they stood, and then the sky ripped open and screamed down on them. They rocked against the gale forces beating at them, until they were forced to their knees and finally flat against the trembling earth.

The screaming changed pitch, and she realized that somehow a protective sphere had opened up within the storm, encompassing only the area where she and Skinner lay, pressed to the ground. Around them the wind howled and the sand battered the air, but a 15-foot diameter eye of the storm surrounded them.

They got to their feet just as it strolled into the calm, carrying a man slung casually over its shoulder.

The face was human--square jawed, blue-eyed, almost Teutonic--but there was something amiss. Some spark of animation that was missing from its symmetrical features. She had seen that face before, melting out of the features of her partner. She reached for her gun, only to realize that she'd dropped it when the storm arrived.

It looked at them with impassive eyes. "Don't bother. Bullets are of no consequence to me. Anyway, you wouldn't want to hurt him." A shrug of its shoulder seemed to indicate the man he was carrying.

Beside her, she could feel Skinner's tension. Could almost feel him assessing the situation, trying to decide whether to attack, or shout for help, or wait and listen another minute.

The Bounty Hunter looked directly at Scully. "I've brought him back to you." Her heart skipped, began hammering against her ribs. Could it be? Could it...? She didn't dare let her mind finish the thought.

In a single fluid movement, he lowered to one knee and then almost carefully placed an unconscious Mulder at Scully's feet.

 

With a wordless cry, she dropped to her lover's side, hands instantly touching, checking for injury. Glaring at the alien who still knelt on the other side of Mulder's body. "What have you done to him?"

The Hunter shrugged. "Nothing. We use standard sleep inducing medications for the jump back to your planet. It's a bit hard on humans otherwise." For the briefest moment she thought he suddenly looked bemused. "Besides, this one....talked a lot." Above her she thought she could hear a small snort from Skinner. Her fingers sought and found Mulder's throat--discovering his pulse beating strong and steadily beneath her touch.

The alien's usual mask returned, and he caught and held Scully's eyes for a long period of time. She had the sensation that she was being weighed, assessed. Finally he nodded. "You'll both be okay." He added, "And he'll wake up in about 15 minutes or so."

He stood, in a movement so swift that she knew only that he was once more standing. Then there was nothing but Mulder--here, now, once more. She let her hands wander--touching, reconfirming the reality of his presence.

 

After that it had been a strange jumble of events and actions. She remembered moments, disconnected from each other. Brief images like half-blurred snapshots from a barely-remembered vacation.

She and Skinner helping Mulder up the hill. Marita and Skinner in urgent consultation.

The clones helping Mulder into a jeep, and her sense of helpless loss of being disconnected from him for even the brief time it took them to settle his body against her in the backseat.

The crystalline moment when he opened his eyes during the ride to the house, and she knew instantly that he knew who she was, and that they were back together.

And finally, finding themselves in a small house, with nothing but the two of them, and all the time in the world.

Their reunion had been swift, hot, almost wordless. They had decided, without a word between them, that questions and explanations and all the rest of the world could wait. As the door was still closing behind the clones who left them quickly and discretely, Mulder reached for her, and she tumbled headlong into the fire that was them.

She flushed at the heated memory of just a few hours ago.

She stood and moved to the window. Sometime during her musings, it had begun to move toward dawn. The eastern horizon showed the faintest glimmer of light--a hairline fracture in the darkness.

She heard him moving in the bedroom. His footsteps padding down the hall. His instincts unerringly leading him right to her.

His arms slid around her waist, and he buried his face against her hair. "I woke up and I missed you."

She felt a sob rise in her throat. "I've missed you, too, Mulder." He stilled against her--listening to her. Listening to all the undercurrents in her voice.

"Where have you been, Mulder?" The tears she'd kept in abeyance all those endless weeks threatening to finally spill over. "I've needed you here."

His hands pulled her even closer. "And I've needed you, Scully. I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have gone. I had to go, I needed to go with them. But the thing is this...."

He paused, and pulled away from her, only long enough to turn her around to face him. In the breaking dawn light, she could just see him clearly. Could see his face, his sleep-tousled hair, his eyes that had owned her now for more years than she could count.

His eyes which now shone with the light that illuminated him at those moments when he had made some fundamental discovery. She was awestruck by the brilliance she saw sparkling there.

"While I was gone I discovered the one truth of my life. My soul knows only one direction--the way home to you."

She was speechless. Could only reach for him, and pull him closer to her than breath or thought or memory. When language finally returned to her, she took his hand, and placed it on her stomach.

"Mulder? I have one more truth to tell you...."


	13. Chapter 13

_Tunisia  
A safe house 20 kilometers from Strughold's compound_

As so often happened, the choices available to them quickly narrowed to one.

Krycek watched in disgust as Skinner and Marita hunched over the map of the compound. Pointing first at one possible entry point, then weighing the merits of other possible approaches. Around them, the three clones--whom he would have dearly loved to dub the Three Stooges, except he had a hunch that each of them would answer to Moe--watched with anxiety.

After the bustle and turmoil of Mulder's deus ex machina like return by the aliens, the remaining players had stood stunned on the hilltop, trying to decide what to do next. They could see that there was now heightened activity occurring around the buildings on the far side of the corn fields.

They had been arguing about various options, when yet another red-haired clone had come scurrying up to the group. He had not brought good news.

While Mulder was being returned to Scully, a group of aliens had delivered some large cases to Strughold. From the clone's description of he contents, it sounded very much like the same sort of weaponry that Krycek and Scully had seen being delivered in Alaska.

That, however, was not the worst of the news. Strughold had met privately with a group of aliens for a few minutes and when they left again, he'd quickly called a meeting of all the section leaders in the compound and announced that the timetable had been stepped up, and that a new phase of testing would begin in the morning, with the addition of new "materials" that he had just received. It was also not at all clear which group of aliens had come calling.

Marita and the clones hadn't been able, or perhaps willing, to fully describe the potential consequences of this change in Strughold's plans--it was only clear that this had changed everything for her in terms of what she and her collaborators were trying to accomplish, and her sense of urgency about the dangers involved.

So, they adjourned back to the current safe house to try to come up with a plan of action.

By Krycek's estimate, they had now been arguing for a good four hours.

Fuck this shit. There was only one viable entry point to the lab they needed and they all knew it. They were simply delaying the inevitable. He strode over to the table, and slapped his palm against the diagram.

"You're just delaying the inevitable." It felt good to snarl, to act without censoring his words or tone. "There's only one fucking way in, through the south door. If we approach from the west, we have to move through way too much open space, and we'll get spotted because we've established that there are guards. And the north was never really an option unless you," he glanced at Skinner, "have some buddies in the Third Infantry who just happen to be vacationing in this area along with a battalion or two and lots of light armor."

Skinner muttered something, and rolled his head on his shoulders. But he looked up at Krycek, and just shrugged, a grudging respect in his eyes. "You're right. The southern route is the only viable plan." Skinner then turned to Marita, and a minute softening in his tone was discernible. "Okay? We're going in on the southern approach." The air of command was unmistakable.

Marita bridled a little, Krycek was amused to see. He knew how much she hated being out of control, and he was also intrigued by the shift in dynamics that he saw between the former AD and Marita. Clearly something had happened, and the scandal hunter in Krycek was pretty damn sure what it was. Well, well, well, that was certainly an interesting twist. He was going to have a hell of a lot of fun with this little development.

He listened while Skinner laid out the details of the operation. Details they had discussed a half-dozen times already, as they ran through their narrowing list of options. He half-expected one of the clones to whip out a notepad and take detailed notes.

Damn. It was going to be amateur hour. Skinner, he knew, would do everything by the book. And he'd long suspected that Marita in the field would be a fearsome and ruthless creature. But these fucking scientists were the wild card. He had no idea how they'd react when the pressure was on, and no one, but no one had yet addressed what might happen to all of them if bullets started flying.

He was really, really getting too old for this shit. In his next career, he was definitely picking an organization with a decent retirement plan.

He looked around the anonymous room, and thought tiredly that safe houses had a certain sameness to them the world over. They all had an air of captured despair and surrender. A capitulation to the inevitable.

He heard Skinner wrapping up the meeting. The agreement was to hit the place at dawn. On paper, at least, it was a surgical strike operation. In and out, low and quiet. They would hit the main lab, retrieve the disks from the data storage room on the far side of the building and obtain the "specimens" from the central testing facility. He hadn't asked what the specimens consisted of because he really didn't want to know. He'd volunteered to run point for Clone #1, who was in charge of getting the disks.

He asked again, more for the sake of argument than anything else. "Shouldn't we involve Mulder and Scully in this? We really need two more people who know how to shoot, and we know that Red, at least, is a dead shot."

Skinner glared at him, and Krycek shifted under the knowledge that the man could probably reach across the table and break his neck long before he could reach his gun, or the palm pilot.

Skinner's tone, however, was surprisingly reasonable. "No. That's not negotiable. She's...They need to get out of here and get back to safety. Kevin will meet them at the house where they're staying and get them to the airstrip in time to meet up with us. They'll be in the other plane, with the engine running. That increases our odds of at least some of us getting out of here and the information getting back to the right hands."

Krycek was left with two thoughts: Skinner wasn't entirely sure to whom the information was going, and wasn't entirely sure it was the right hands, but he seemed to have run out of ideas and options. He was also sure that Skinner was hiding something about Mulder and Scully.

It was nearly midnight, and they would need to leave at 5 a.m. to start their assault on the compound.

The clones were returning to the compound for the night, so they would be in place in the morning. One of the clones from this project had remarked wryly that one of the advantages of everyone looking exactly the same was that it was easier to hide the fact that someone was missing. Krycek had barely refrained from replying that it also made it way more fucking difficult to tell who was actually on your side.

The safe house, he realized with a jolt, only had two bedrooms. On the theory that the best defense is a good offense, he headed into one and closed the door. Let Skinner have the very short and very lumpy couch. When he stumbled out a couple of hours later, for a bathroom run, he was not really surprised to see the other bedroom door firmly closed and an unoccupied couch in the living room.

 

Dawn came all too early. He'd never been a morning person, and waking up to a glowering Skinner shaking his shoulder was definitely not his idea of a good wake-up call. He growled back, "I'm up, I'm up already. Just give me five fucking minutes, ok?"

There wasn't a hot cup of coffee waiting for him. Yup, in his next life, a job with a retirement plan and accommodations with room service. He grimaced to himself. It was the small, accomplishable goals that made life worthwhile.

Sometime while he'd been sleeping, Marita had managed to secure an impressive armory of weapons. There was range of pistols, light mortars, grenades, flash-bang grenades, and canisters that looked like they contained something considerably more lethal than tear gas.

When he started to ask her about it, she brushed him aside with the retort that someone in the group needed to think about logistics. He almost asked her which of Skinner's logistical needs she'd met last night, but at the last minute thought better of it.

As they were loading up the jeep, he managed to pull her aside for just a second. Tell me again why we fucking have to do this here and now?" He hoped he wasn't whining.

For the first time since they had all come back together, she fixed him with that too lucid stare--blue eyes of endless calm depths gazing through him, finding him wanting. Then she relented. It seemed to him later that she wanted to share the weight with someone, and he was the only other one there who had walked through all of the same darkened alleys that she had.

"Do you want several hundred Gibson Praises loose in the world? An entire generation of them? That's what the tests in Florida and Italy were aiming at. They nearly succeeded, too. There's a mop-up operation going on right now in Italy. If this new material that Strughold received is what I think it is, the next tests will be 100% successful."

At first it didn't make sense to him, and then he shuddered as he considered the implications. The Consortium hadn't been able to finish all the tests on young Gibson, but they had learned enough to know that he was a dangerous variable. His ability to communicate with The Greys was undisputed. The working theory had also been that he might be an agent or creation of the rebel forces. That there might be something in his hybrid or enhanced physiology that was an advantage to the faction that sought to overthrow the group of aliens that had made the pact with the Consortium back in the 1940s.

She saw him realize the problem, and nodded at him. "If Strughold succeeds, and Aston was right with his theory, then earth becomes a battleground in their civil war."

"Fuck that. We need to move." It occurred to him that they might only be delaying the inevitable, but when faced with a crisis, it always seemed to him better to do something, rather than wait to see what would happen next.

She nodded again. "Yes, we do."

 

The initial phases of the operation went smoothly. They parked the jeep at the rendezvous point. There were two clones waiting for them there. One would wait--keeping the engine running, while the other took them in through the south entrance.

They hiked in silently, through rows of eerily perfect corn, trying hard not to brush any of the stalks, to give any evidence of their passage.

The hallway into the lab building was long, sterile white, leading off into an endless series of closed doors. From the diagrams, Krycek knew that the data storage area was at the far end of the hallway, behind a set of double swinging doors, and the specimen lab was behind the third door on the right.

He gestured impatiently to "his" clone, mouthing "Let's go." They set off down the hallway at a quiet trot.

The door to the storage unit was locked. It threw him for a loop. He was reaching for his gun to shoot out the lock, when the clone suddenly grabbed his arm. He gestured toward the security card reader and number pad by the doorframe. The clone quickly slid a card through the reader, and then punched in a complicated series of numbers. A breathless moment of waiting, and the door clicked and hissed open.

The room wasn't a room, it was a goddamn warehouse, and it was full of disks. Row after row of 10-foot metal racks stretched out in front of him, and each of them was packed with neatly and cryptically labeled disk storage containers.

He glared at the man standing next to him. Don't fucking tell me we're supposed to take all of these?"

The clone shook his head. "No, there are 10 disks we need to get...but I've never been in here before, and I'm not sure..."

"Shit." Resignation and a certain anxiety settling low in the pit of his stomach. "What will the label say?"

"We're looking for any disk that has a 22-F code in the first part of the serial number."

"How long do we think the security cameras will be off in this room?"

"Uh...about 10 minutes?"

"Fuck, fuck, fuck." He looked about helplessly. "Let's do this."

It took more than 15 minutes to locate all the disks. He felt ridiculous, like some college kid on a scavenger hunt in a library. Jogging up and down the rows of disks, muttering to himself "22-F, 22-F...."

Finally, they had all the disks. Just as Krycek glanced at his watch, and realized that they had blown their 10 minute window, he heard a klaxon sound in the distance. Swearing, he stuffed the disks into his jacket.

"Let's blow this popcorn stand." They took off down the hallway, sprinting as though the hounds of hell were after them. Which, as it transpired, they were.

The others were just running from the lab, as Krycek blew through the double doors. Skinner yelled at him. "Why did you set off the alarm?"

"Fuck you. It wasn't me--must have been your girl." He glanced back at Marita, who didn't bother answering, just ran past him.

They flew out of the building, and headed into the cornfield.

There was an ambush waiting for them at the jeep. As they rounded the corner, he heard the crack of a rifle and something went stinging past his cheek.

Instinct took over, and he stopped and dropped, making himself as small a target as possible. Looking for cover, any sort of cover. There was very little between the edges of the corn field, and the small grouping of trees and rocks that blocked his view into the clearing where the jeep waited.

Behind him and beside him, he could hear Skinner and Marita. He looked back, and saw two of the clones, stunned looks on their faces. He motioned frantically at them. Get down, you stupid jerks, get down. It grew quiet. Too quiet.

Skinner low-crawled up to where he lay. "Marita thinks this might be some of the rebels." Perfect. Just perfect.

"So what now?"

"If it is the rebels, there will only be two of them."

"And if it's not the rebels?"

A shrug was the only response he got.

"Any chance of a flanking maneuver? No, I suppose not."

He had the half-hysterical thought that they were Butch and Sundance, and he was clearly Sundance, but all he could remember was the final scene in the movie and the cold reality of what happened to the robbers turned folk-heroes in that small town in Bolivia.

He looked over at Skinner who regarded him steadily. "Straight in."

"Unless you've got the Third Infantry in your back pocket."

"Uh uh--that was your job."

A death head's grin. "Then straight in it is."

It was two rebels, but they were Tunisian, militant Christian separatists, not aliens. Krycek recognized the insignia from his stay in the penal colony, and was trying to remember the correct pass phrase that would indicate that he was a brother in arms, when a third rebel jumped out from the left.

Before he could react, Skinner pushed him to the side, nearly knocking him to the ground. Skinner dropped to one knee and took out the rebel.

The rebel squeezed off a burst from his gun before collapsing, and the whistle of projectiles through the air was cut off by the sickening thud of bullets burying themselves in human flesh. He heard a surprised grunt from Skinner.

Without stopping to think, Krycek pulled himself up, and screamed out the phrase that had finally surfaced in his overloaded mind. The remaining two rebels stopped, puzzled by the unexpected display of solidarity, and just as they began lowering their weapons, grinning, Krycek raised his gun and killed them. With extreme prejudice.

He turned to find Skinner laying ashen-faced on the ground, his chest a spreading bloom of horrible red.

Marita dashed into the clearing, her gun drawn, and he heard her sudden gasp, and she dropped to Skinner's side. She pulled her shirt off over her head, pressing it into the wounds, trying to staunch the bleeding. "Skinner, can you hear me? Can you move?"

Skinner opened his eyes and nodded faintly. Marita yelled something at the clones and they took off running, although not toward the compound. Krycek and Marita levered Skinner from the ground, and helped him to the jeep.

The drive to the airstrip was surreally long. He drove, and Marita shouted instructions to him from the backseat, where she sat trying to hold Skinner as still as possible.

Finally, they were there. Two small planes sat on the runway, engines running. She screamed at him over the noise and wind. "Take the disks to the first plane and tell them to go. They have a 30 second window left to take off. GO!"

He ran toward the plane, which began slowly taxiing, even as he drew near. He had to run along side to see Mulder and Scully where they sat near the open door, nervous tension evident in each line of their bodies. Scully was on the far side of Mulder and slightly behind. Her presence suggested more than fully seen. He hurled the disks at them; Mulder caught them in mid arc. Mulder stared at Krycek's blood-stained clothing.

"What the hell happened to you? Did you get shot?" He was shouting at Krycek over the roar of the propeller, and the door, which was beginning to close, a panel sliding up from the bottom.

There was no time to explain. Krycek could only yell back, "No. Not me." He thought he saw the sickening comprehension begin to spread across Mulder's face, but then the door finished slamming shut, and the plane picked up sudden speed.

He paused for a microsecond, watching the small jet pull away, and then he sprinted back to the other plane. Marita and the pilot had somehow managed to lift Skinner up into the craft. Krycek threw himself through the door, slamming it behind him.

The plane's interior had been stripped down. Where there would normally be a dozen seats, there were only four left, all at the back of the cabin. Marita sat with Skinner's head cradled in her lap, leaning against the wall of the front part of the plane.

Beside her two large crates were web-strapped in.

The pilot looked back from the cockpit, and Marita motioned to him. "Go. _Now!_ "

They began to taxi.

Krycek looked over again to where the other two were. He had witnessed death too many times to misinterpret the signs. Skinner's blue lips, the grey pallor of the skin told Krycek everything he needed to know. That, and the ever-widening pool of blood in which Skinner lay. He watched the big man laboring to breathe, watched his chest rising and falling, knowing that soon it would fall, and not rise again.

Krycek had long ago given up any illusion that there was anything noble or dignified about death. What he had forgotten was the sense of outrage that could overtake him when death came too soon. He hadn't felt that in so very long.

Skinner opened his eyes, looking around startled, lost, as a spasm wracked him. Marita tried to soothe him, her hand gentle on his forehead. She seemed to be speaking to him, her low tone drowned out by the sound of the propellers. He couldn't see her face, which was curtained by her hair.

Skinner locked eyes with him--a moment of lucid infinity--and Krycek could do nothing but look back, knowing that all his guilt and uncertainty and weakness were there for Skinner to see and assess one last time. Nothing left to hide. All the secrets that were knowable had been exposed.

He thought he saw an infinitesimal movement of Skinner's head, something almost like a nod, and then he looked back up at the woman who held his head on her lap.

Skinner's lips moved, and Marita bent low to try to hear what he was saying. Krycek felt like he was watching some kind of tableaux, a drama that he didn't want to see unfold, but whose ending he had to endure.

They cleared Tunisian airspace. He found he could think of nothing at all.

Somewhere over the Mediterranean, Skinner's chest stopped moving. The blood on the floor of the plane shone shocking red, bright, garish under the harsh sunlight streaming through the windows.

A brief shudder shook Skinner's body, and then he was still.

Krycek watched Marita carefully close Skinner's eyes, her hand slowly brushing over his face in a silent benediction. When she looked up at him, he was not at all surprised to see her face scored with the glistening tracks of ceaseless tears.


	14. Chapter 14

_Arlington National Cemetery_

The crack of the rifle shots ricocheted through her, echoing in the vast empty chasm in her heart. The open wound that refused to begin healing.

Scully flinched as the second volley thundered. CRACK!.

And again. CRACK!

The reverberations of the 21-gun salute still wavered on the air when the bugler, off in the distance, began the plaintive call of "Taps."

Surrounded and constrained by the formal pageantry of a military funeral, there was no space to cry, to rail at the gods. No room to do anything but stand at attention at Skinner's graveside, holding the flag that had been presented to her just moments earlier. Nothing to do but stare straight ahead, trying not to see the quiet polished coffin in front of her.

Her vision blurred, caught in the endless blue of the cloth in her hands--the stars melting under her tear-dimmed gaze into meaningless white symbols.

She drew a deep shaky breath and looked up the mocking perfect blue sky. It should have been raining.

The service ended, and she was vaguely aware of movement around her. Hushed conversations starting and fading into meaningless jumbles of sound as people began drifting away from the grave. Finally there were only the sounds of the birds in the distant trees and the cars rushing along the highway to the east of the cemetery.

When she could see again, she realized she was staring out over the endless rows of white markers that stretched out forever across the serene green lawn. A silent sea of whitecaps, breaking on an inland shore.

It was fitting that he come here. That he should be laid to rest among this fellowship of the nation's fallen heroes. This corps would welcome him, they would understand the sense of honor and duty that had driven him to the very end. This was fit company for him.

And yet. And yet, she couldn't shake the sense of unfairness.

Her initial shock had left her numb, uncomprehending that such a thing could happen. Then after a day or two, all the numbness had been burned away by her anger. The rage that welled in her chest in the middle of the night. The clear knowledge that this was so wrong. It shouldn't have been him. No victory was worth this price.

She could feel Mulder standing behind her. Waiting, simply waiting for her. She appreciated more than her grief-struck heart could say that he didn't rush in and try to comfort her, offering her meaningless words of consolation. That he respected her need for private mourning. That he understood that for now no words he could offer would help her comprehend this injustice.

He waited for her. And he was there in the middle of the night to hold her when she couldn't stand it anymore.

She knew her grief would eventually ease. But it was still too raw, stinging in the unfairness of all that had happened. She couldn't even find words to put shape to all that she was mourning. To describe her loss. She had always known that Skinner was more than a colleague, but until his death, she'd never tried to put into words what he had been.

She thought again, of their brief embrace on the hillside in Tunisia, just before she saw him alive for the last time. Her chest tightened at the memory, breath harsh in her lungs. Had he known? Had he had some premonition? Had he seen his avatar one last time?

Skinner had obviously known something might happen. The surprises that awaited them in DC after they'd returned had proved that. But maybe that was simply the habits of a life-long warrior, who understood that death can wait for you anywhere. The careful preparations of a man who lived by the rules, even in the midst of lawless game.

She would not find her answers here.

"Damn you, Skinner," she whispered. "I miss you."

She walked out into the midst of the sea of gravestones and stood listening to the wind for a long time before turning back to meet Mulder and go home.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He watched her black-coated figure seem to recede into the distance, although at first she didn't physically move at all. He desperatelywanted to go to her, to cross the 10 feet that separated them, and rock her in his arms until all her grief washed away. But he knew it was impossible. All he could do for her right now was wait. So he waited.

It gave him time to continue to sort through all that had happened since he'd been gone, since he'd been back. So much water flowing under so many bridges, and so many cross-overs washed out to sea.

He thought that maybe, just maybe, if he replayed all the facts and events often enough he might find the pattern, the reason for how things had ended as they had.

The trip back from Tunisia had been surreal--a slowly unfolding nightmare that refused to end.

He was suffering some kind of amnesia from his time away. He wasn't entirely clear if he'd been somewhere in outer space, on a space craft, or exactly where. For now all his brain could recall were hazy images of lights and humanoid shapes with no distinct features. Sometimes he woke in the middle of the night with the sense that he had learned something vital, but just as he would try to speak that thing outloud, the words to describe it would evaporate.

The first distinct memory he had after leaving Skinner in the Oregon woods was waking to find himself jolting along a Tunisian road, his head cradled in Scully's lap, and discovering that her eyes still spoke to him in their private, exclusive language.

Then there had been the fever and tangle of their reunion, followed by the news that reshaped his world around him.

He still trembled when he considered the implications of their child. 

Their child. The words struck strange, resonating chords in his soul, and he was only gradually coming to terms with all that it meant. The impossible hope.

What felt like just moments after she'd told him, and his passionate, joyous reaction, they'd been roused from their bed by an urgent pounding on their door. A breathless and clearly agitated clone had told them to pack "immediately" and come with him. He could tell them only that "something was going down" and that the others would meet them at the airfield. He added that Skinner had said to "get their asses in gear."

There were no choices but to follow the directions.

Then the awful montage of images began: the banality of waiting in an airplane interrupted by a bloody Krycek hurling something at him, the cryptic statement that he had just begun to decipher when the plane's door shut and they flew into yet another unknown, and the fight all through the flight to keep the panic from his face, so that he wouldn't alarm Scully unnecessarily.

But then there was Malta, and meeting up with the others, and his worst--their worst--fears were confirmed.

They touched down at a private airstrip about 20 minutes ahead of the other plane, and as Mulder was hesitantly trying to explain to Scully what Krycek had said just before they'd left Tunisia, the other plane arrived.

Mulder and Scully sprinted in unison across the tarmac to the plane, tugging at the door, even before the plane had drifted to a full stop, and when the door finally pulled away, they were so unprepared for what they found.

Of the many images that would haunt him until he died, Mulder thought the one he might most like to repress was Skinner's too-bloody, too-still body lying on the cabin floor.

Scully's gasp of horror and instinctive move forward to help Skinner was stopped by Alex's snarl.

"He's dead. Has been for over an hour." Then Alex threw himself from the plane, striding past them without another word, his face a mask of some dark despair that Mulder couldn't begin to interpret.

Marita had been sitting with her back against the far wall. She stared unseeingly at Skinner, until Scully climbed into the plane. Then she'd looked up at Scully and simply shaken her head--her face a mask not of her usual composure, but a living anguish that hurt to look at.

It seemed that Marita had contacts everywhere. In mere hours, she managed to obtain transit papers for Mulder, arrange for a coffin to ship Skinner's body in, and secure their passages back home.

Once they were all back in the US, Marita disappeared.

Mulder and Scully spent most of their initial days back trying to explain Mulder's reappearance, what the hell they had all been doing in Tunisia, and how Skinner had been killed.

They spent their nights alternating between trying to explain the events in Alaska and Tunisia to the Lone Gunmen, and trying to come to understand for themselves what had happened to them. All that was going to happen.

Then one day the FBI's questions stopped. At the 800th (give or take) hearing that Mulder had been called to testify at, a somber Department of State official, accompanied by a somber and uncomfortable AD from the international terrorism unit of the FBI had suddenly walked into the room, presented a series of documents to the hearing panel. Then the panel and the two officials had a long urgent conversation in hushed tones.

He couldn't hear the exchange, but it was clear that no one was happy. It seemed some sort of irrefutable document or evidence had surfaced that was screwing up everyone's day. He thought he caught the phrases "insurgency," "deep cover," and "national security."

After much muted debate, the two men left just as abruptly as they'd arrived, and the panel chair made the surprising statement that the inquiry into the death of former AD Walter Skinner was closed.

Specifics about the conclusion of the investigation of Skinner's death were never disclosed, but plans for his full honors military funeral in a week's time were announced the next day.

Mulder resigned from the FBI the same day.

Mulder shook his head--so much to try to comprehend. The reality of his present circumstances shouldered its way into his consciousness. He was standing beside Skinner's grave.

Skinner. There was another mystery, as it turned out, that he would never fully fathom. Skinner who had been more than a friend in life, had managed to surprise them in death as well.

Once the inquisition into his death was closed, his lawyer had contacted Scully. It seemed that Skinner had left nearly his entire estate to her. An educational trust had been established for the child a distant cousin. Everything else had been left to Scully. She had been shocked, disbelieving, but there had been a letter addressed to her from Skinner that gave her some explanation. He still didn't know what that explanation was, because she'd read the letter twice, and then burned it. He'd known, from the look on her face, that he shouldn't ask what the letter said.

Skinner had left a gap in their lives that he was still trying to understand. The funeral this afternoon should have offered "closure"--whatever it was that psychologists meant by that--but it seemed to Mulder that it would take more than the drama of uniformed soldiers and a horse-drawn caisson to close this story.

He watched Scully move further away from the open grave behind her. Saw her slowly walking with no real sense of direction or purpose. She seemed weighted with all that she carried.

He would let her journey only so much further alone, and then he would go to her. He could wait for a little longer.

Scully was still at the FBI. Her status was pending reassignment. AD Jameson, to whom Scully now reported, had offered her the X-Files, but Scully hadn't decided what to do. Mulder refused to provide any input into her decision. He told her that he was in no position to advise anyone on their careers. Look where he'd ended up, after all. She'd laughed at him, and hadn't asked again.

He marveled a little at how quickly her apartment had become home for him. He still kept his place in Alexandria, but he hadn't slept there more than two nights since they'd come back. Particularly once Krycek had shown up.

Both Marita and Alex had disappeared somewhere between Immigration and Customs at Dulles Airport when they'd all arrived from Malta. Mulder had assumed that they had gone off somewhere together. All he knew is hat they'd both disappeared, which made sense in Krycek's case, as Mulder assumed there were multiple warrants out for his arrest.

But on the third day after they'd been back, Mulder went over to Scully's to find Krycek skulking on her couch. The first of the interrogation's over Skinner's death had begun that morning, and Mulder had needed to run to blow off some the fury and sorrow the questioning had raised in him. He'd gone home, run, showered and picked up some spare clothes before going over to Scully's.

The run had cleared his mind, and the anticipation of evening lounging on the couch with Scully had him smiling as he entered her apartment. He'd even jokingly called out, "Honey, I'm home."

He had not been prepared for Alex's voice to respond. "Ward, I'm so glad you're back--the Beav had such a bad day."

"What the fuck are you doing here?" Mulder's snarl had been instinctive.

"Aren't you glad to see me?"

"Where's Scully? Is she ok? Is the ...." His panic kicked in almost immediately. But he managed to stop himself before blurting out anything about the baby.

"Relax--she's getting groceries. She left you a note." Krycek indicated a scrap of paper on the coffee table.

The handwriting was hers, and as he read the note he remembered that she'd said something this morning about needing to pick up some things tonight.

"What the fuck are you doing here, Krycek?"

"What? Can't a guy drop by and visit old friends?" The mockery in his tone nearly disguised the hurt that Mulder saw flashing through the changeable green eyes.

Scully had arrived home at just that moment, and somehow the three of them wound up having dinner together, around her comfortable kitchen table, like some mutant family gathering.

As the evening grew late, Mulder began to glance meaningfully first at his watch, and then at the door, but Krycek wasn't taking the hint. Finally, Scully began yawning and stretching and smiling with quietly smoldering eyes at Mulder.

She stood from the couch, and offered Mulder her hand. He took it, and stood also, but looked quizzically at Krycek who remained slouched in the armchair. Krycek gave him an impassive stare in return.

Scully tugged Mulder toward the bedroom. He followed, because his body couldn't stand not to, but his mind was still puzzling over how to ask her what was going on. Before he'd formulated the question, she'd gone to her linen closet and pulled out a couple blankets and a pillow. She disappeared into the living room, where he heard her saying something to Krycek, and then she walked back into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. 

"Scully?" He knew she would hear all the questions he needed to ask in that one word.

"I told him he could stay on the couch tonight." She stopped, and looked over Mulder's shoulder, seeing something far away from the present. "I don't think he has anywhere to go."

There was more to it than that, Mulder thought, but she seemed to feel this was important, and he was in no position to deny her anything.

The next day, Mulder gave Krycek the keys to his apartment, and told him he could stay there.

Krycek hung around for about a week, seeming to be there everytime Mulder turned around. An ever-present and annoying presence, like an unemployed brother-in-law.

Then, one night, they went out to the warehouse, to help the Gunmen finish dismantling the command center. Mulder arrived to find Krycek deep in conversation with Scully. He was handing her something, and whatever he was saying about it seemed to be upsetting her. He thought he saw her face glistening with tears.

He felt a deep, atavistic rage overtaking him. As Mulder strode across the floor to where they stood, Krycek finished talking. And then Mulder had to stop in amazement. Scully reached up and gave Krycek a sudden, brief hug. She kissed his cheek, and then quickly walked out the backdoor to the courtyard.

Krycek seemed stunned. He stood frozen where Scully had left him, staring after her, as uncertain as Mulder had ever seen him.

Then he managed to shake off the spell, and he'd turned and walked out of the warehouse, brushing past Mulder as though he wasn't even there.

Mulder hurried to the courtyard. Scully stood, her face wet with tears, staring up at the skies. It was unusually clear night, and even with the local light pollution, the display of stars and planets was breathtaking in its clarify.

"Scully, are you are alright?" He spoke softly, not touching her yet.

She turned to him, and reached out her hand, pulling him close. She buried her face against his chest, and his arms locked around her. Although he could feel her tears soaking his shirt, her muffled voice was level. "Yeah. I'm ok."

"What did Krycek want?"

She didn't answer him for a long time, but then she finally pulled back a little and reached in her coat pocket. "He gave me this." And she handed him an oddly stylized Palm Pilot.

"What the...?"

"It was the control for those things in Skinner's blood."

Jesus. He breath left him instantaneously as though he'd sustained a prize fighter's blow to his solar plexus. "Why....? What..." He struggled to understand. To control his rage and urge to sprint down the street after Krycek and beat him to death.

"I don't know why." She watched him steadily, and he was struck by how calm she seemed."He said he wanted me to have it. And he said he wouldn't be back. Frohike got him connected with a group of mercenaries, and he said he was leaving to try his hand at an old game."

They had not seen Krycek again, and Mulder thought he'd seen Scully quietly throw the control mechanism into Skinner's grave this afternoon, when she'd thrown in her handful of earth.

The wind in the cemetery gusted suddenly, and Mulder pulled his coat tighter about him. Summer had given way suddenly to fall, and the wind had a chill to it now that reminded them that November wasn't far away.

He looked at Scully again. She was standing where she'd been for the last 20 minutes. Finally she turned and started back to him. Her tears had dried, and her eyes were clear again, although shadowed by sorrow.

But she was Scully, and her strength shone through, even when she could no longer see it.

He met her halfway, and they went home together.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_Unknown location_

"You failed." Her voice was crisp, unemotional. A casual listener, although there were no casual listeners within 1000 miles of here, might have assumed that she was discussing something trivial--a poor showing in a flower arranging show. The casual listener would have been very wrong.

"You always see things in such black and white terms. Success, failure. Up, down. We didn't achieve all our goals, no. But, we did...."

"You failed." Her tone a little sharper now, as she turned from the window she'd been gazing out, to look at the man lounging in one of the leather chairs across the desk. Behind her the setting sun illuminated her hair, creating a dangerous halo-illusion. "There was no room for that sort of blunder."

The dark-skinned man straightened in the chair, his sudden ramrod-straight posture unmistakably military. "I'd be careful, if I were you in assigning blame too quickly. It's not as though you don't have some loose ends to deal with. And, we're still missing some data."

"I got all the disks. And you've had four weeks to work on the data."

"I know." His voice shifted oddly, sliding between American and British inflections. "But, there must have been a secondary data collection going on, or Strughold deliberately miscoded those disks."

She grimaced. "Well, we're not ever going to know, are we?"

White teeth flashed. "It's astonishing what a kiloton or three of explosives will do."

Her stare was level, neither impressed nor appreciably amused. She seemed to be assessing the man in front of her, weighing his fitness for some impossible task. She found him wanting. "And Alaska?"

"Same story, different cover. There's been an earthquake." Now he seemed hesitant. "I still haven't found that bunker you told me about."

She nodded. Unsurprised. So little surprised her.

"So what are we left with?" He seemed to understand that it was a rhetorical question, as he offered no response. She swiveled 90 degrees, facing the expensive oil painting over the fireplace on the right side of the room. She continued, "We have the data, or at least most of it. The experiments have been halted. We have had initial, successful contact with the other faction."

She was quiet for a long time then, and finally he cleared his throat. "I was sorry to hear about Skinner. He seemed like a good man."

She sighed almost noiselessly. "Mistakes were made. They always are." Her voice was level, and only one man might have heard the undercurrent that trembled far below the surface.

She turned back to him then, fully focused. He shifted uncomfortably under her intense, cauterizing gaze. "So, John Byron Aston, would you say that we are in the clear to wait for the results of the Epsilon Test?"

"Rodden....I go by Rodden now." His murmured response was only to buy time, and she paid it no heed. He considered her statements carefully, no casualness evident in any line of his superbly conditioned body.

"Yes." He faltered under her unyielding stare. "Probably. He's always been a wild card, but she's been far more stable than we had any right to hope. She didn't even quit the FBI..." He considered further. "Yes, we should be okay. It's a few more months, but we have people in place to ensure as much tranquillity as we can manage."

Marita nodded. "I concur. We'll simply have to wait and see what....develops."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"Oh." She sounded startled, and he felt an instant of panic until she said softly, "Mulder, come here."

He walked over, to find her smiling--a smile of undiluted wonder and joy, the first he'd seen since their return. She was holding out her hand. He instinctively reached back. She clasped his fingers tightly, and then guided them to rest on her gently rounded belly.

"Wait....right there. Did you feel that? The baby just moved."

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's notes and thanks: First and foremost, I owe an enormous debt to the superb beta talents of the fabulous three--who will have to remain nameless for various reasons, but you know who are, and I hope you know how deeply I appreciate your assistance. You were all utterly wonderful in your support and help with this story. Your beta, feedback and suggestions are all deeply, deeply appreciated. Any remaining typos, plot problems or strange characterizations are solely my fault.
> 
> I also owe deep thanks to three others, who were there throughout. Thank you for the support--it meant the world.


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